When I think of how I got started writing, there's one memory that I consistently attribute with being my first inspiration to write. It's the memory of my second oldest sister sitting in the doorway to the bedroom that I shared at the time with three other sisters, quietly starting a bedtime story with words that went something like "Once upon a time there was a pirate island shaped like a hand in the middle of the ocean..." She would hold up her own hand, so that we could visualize the island in our minds, and then she would point to somewhere on her hand, (the space between her fingers where they join to the palm was the most likely candidate) tell us that was where the pirates lived on the island, and continue on with her story. With that simple act, she transported us from our darkened bedroom to an island in the middle of a nameless ocean, where pirates roamed, treasure hid, and adventure waited. Eventually, my second oldest sister moved out of the house and the story telling duty was passed to the oldest sister in our bedroom at the time. When she later moved into a vacant bedroom in our home, I became the oldest sister in the shared bedroom, and thus the designated story teller.
I remember fragments of the stories that I told in my role as the bedtime storyteller. Nothing was ever so impressive that I felt the urge or the desire to write them down. In fact, most of the stories that I told during that time, I knew to be very heavily influenced by whatever book or movie I had recently read or seen, so they weren't completely original, and I was aware of that fact. Even though those tales have been lost to the marching on of time, what has stuck with me in the years since those bedtime stories is the desire to create pictures with the words that I use in my stories and poems. For me, each of the pieces that I have written has taken on its own life even as they started out as a reflection of the thoughts that I was thinking and the emotions I was experiencing when I wrote them.
And what of the hand-shaped pirate island? Does it feature in any of my writing? The answer to that question is no. While the island has certainly left its fingerprints on my writing by giving me a love for the art of storytelling and is occasionally at the forefront of my mind as I write, it has not made it onto the pages of my writing, and probably never will.