Joanne Gail Johnson

As an avid, life long reader of children's books from around the world, the absolute dearth of Caribbean content began to cause a motivating heart ache.

I couldn't articulate it in childhood, but I felt the void acutely as I skipped through English country lanes with Beatrix Potter and trounced through my imagination holding hands with Enid Blyton's world view. As a classroom teacher in the 1980s I employed the conceptual rhymes of Dr. Seuss, wielded the "Classics" of other civilisations and admired the comic and fantastic boldness of Roald Dahl.

As a television producer in the 1990s, the need to create content inspired by our here and now, began to arise in me spontaneously, compulsively even; as though ripe for the picking. And it never occurred to me that I couldn't or shouldn't; that it wouldn't come to pass.

It was an inevitable as mango season.

Everything specific to me, to us here, blossoms with universal appeal, no less.

Had I not been a devoted playmate to the characters of others? Had I not, over a lifetime, inflected my English with their intonations, sacrificing our rhythm and rhyme, our everyday Calypso...

With the ever-increasing colonising forces of Hollywood and cable television, there came an inner movement that demanded some effort, any effort, to check against invasion. All the spice and juice of our lives was seldom on the menu, except as a dash of flavour to curry favour with the increasing diversity of multi-cultural markets.

And so, here I am, eighteen years after my first book Go Barefoot was accepted by an established publisher Macmillan-Caribbean (ironically UK-based) in 1998. Here I am on the world wide internet, digital sales platform Amazon, with several books and anthologised stories on offer.

Using my professional experience in television production and theatre-in-education work, I've also converted Sally's Way (2002 Macmillan Caribbean ) into an award-winning feature length family film. It's the first-ever of my country The Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, where I was born, bred and am still based. www.sallyswayfilm.com

Over the years of creating television and publishing children's stories, I learned a lot about the capacity to bloom, without apology, right where you're planted. As the series editor of Island Fiction 'tween' novellas by Macmillan-Caribbean, in 2009 I facilitated the dream's of other authors. Responsible for selection and acquisition, as well as series design decisions, five of the six titles I published were by first time Caribbean authors from Trinidad, (Escape from Silk-Cotton Forest, The Chalice Project) Guyana (The Swan Island Children) and Jamaica (Night of the Indigo, Delroy in the Marog Kingdom).

I've learned how to tap into the unbounded potential of all that is accessible here and now. Based on a creative portfolio spanning 25 years and a narrative thesis, "Manifesting Self Through Creative Expression" I was awarded an MCGI in Education Leadership through City & Guilds, UK. Part of my mission to facilitate cultural sovereignty in others is fulfilled through authoring and facilitating workshops in Creativity, inspired in part by the work of Julia Cameron The Artist's Way and Viola Spolin's Improvisational Theatre.

It's an honour if you've read this far, and a great privilege if you purchase any of my books with which to gift a child.