One question that all writers are often asked is how early did you begin writing.
My answer is three years old when I wrote my first effective poem.
Even before I wrote, I had begun drawing. I did the usual coloring in coloring books, but I also tried to draw my own shapes of animals and humans and buildings and colored them.
Here’s how the first poem happened. My older sister June had begun attending school at five years old. I was two years younger, and I wanted to know what she was learning, so I would ask her and she would show me how she was learning to make letters. I copied her homework and learned the letters and their sounds. Then she began forming words with her letters, so I copied that too. This also allowed me to begin reading, and I began reading poems in My Book House. She saw how fast I was learning, and one day during the next summer, she challenged me to write a story. She would write one too and when we were finished, we would compare them and choose a winner.
I wrote a long poem about people who lived inside the earth and invited humans to come down and join them. By drumming and chanting, the subterranean species caught people’s attention and lured them down into the earth through caves and caverns lit by flaming torches. Of course, I didn’t write as an adult. Typical lines would be something like “Boom! Boom! /Come down. Come down.” I also illustrated the poem with colored flames and shadows inside the cavernous depths. Humans were afraid at first, but finally a group went down and were welcomed joyfully by the underworld beings.
I never saw what my sister had written because after she had finished reading my poem, she looked up and said, “You win.” She refused to show me what she had written.
Mother kept the poem in a scrapbook, but that scrapbook along with photo albums disappeared after mother died. I can only speculate what happened to it.