Islands make me think of buried treasure and pirates; They make me think of jungles and hermits; secret places that might not have been discovered yet. I think of caves and cliffs and the smell of salt water. Many of my stories take place, at least in part, on islands, or on different planets (which are like islands on a much larger scale).

     I lived on an an island for a summer, Isle Royale National Park. It is a wind-blown wilderness with its own composition of hundreds of surrounding tiny islands, each of them with potential secrets. I used to canoe from island to island and give each one a name.

A favorite author and illustrator of mine named Tove Jansson responded to a letter I wrote to her in 1977. (She is the only author I have ever received a letter from, and I remember writing to all my favorite authors.) She wrote to me on a card that showed a tiny island in the Gulf of Finland, and wrote, “This is the island where I live five months a year. It looks rather forbidding but is full of wild flowers. You should see the storms out there in the middle of the Finnish Gulf – Splendid. The signal mast blew down last spring. Now I am in town again and miss the loneliness.”   

   

    This is an unfinished map I drew in 1988 of the Adriatic Sea where Boris, Stefanie, and I sailed. Roderich is the name of the boat. That summer we sailed along the coast of what used to be Yugoslavia, weaving our way through the islands, waving at times to people on shore or in boats. We moored the boat in the evenings in island harbors, and explored small villages. One evening a dozen or so children scrambled down to the dock for a view of a shark, which they pointed out to us with great pride, as though they had produced it themselves. The language barriers were easily overcome as we all shared the excitement of this rare sight. I remember the joy of every new island we encountered, and a sadness with every island we left behind