The Lurking Place of E. Rochelle Potter

     If you called me sentimental, I wouldn’t be offended because you would be right! For that reason, there is one person above all the rest that I simply must shine my first spotlight on.

​

     Aside from my mother, there is one other person who has supported my creativity for literally my entire life. Now I don’t know which of us was the original embryo but she’s always been stronger than me so I must assume the doctors were correct when they pulled her from our mother’s womb first, despite our pre-natal vying for supremacy; swapping positions just before our birth. (Sibling rivalry forces me to declare that I would have been born first if she hadn’t kicked me out of the way!)

​

     You’ve obviously guessed by now that this first and most special spotlight goes to my twin sister. Jamie Leah Potter was born on Saturday, December 8, 1984, thirty seconds before her slightly smaller counterpart (aka moi.) I was the "pink and yellow baby" and she was the "purple and blue." Don't be alarmed, I'm not referring to our complexions but to the colors our mother dressed us in to tell us apart. (We still wonder at times, as I'm sure every identical pair must, whether our mother ever mixed us up. Is she really me and I really she?)

​

     Regardless, Jamie was my best friend growing up. We got into all sorts of hijinks together when we were small. She was the Fred Weasley to my George (or vice versa) and even through time, fights and distance as we grew older, we've still remained very close.

​

     Zeroing focus back to the subject of writing, (I did warn that I tend to be tangential, yes?) Jamie was my first audience. For reasons unbeknownst to me to this very day, I've always loved being scared, even when I was small. There's an exhilarating rush that comes with being scared out of your wits while simultaneously knowing what you're afraid of can't really hurt you. The more macabre, gruesome or chillingly supernatural the story is, the better!

​

     Naturally this love of fear made me gravitate toward weaving my own scary tales. Many a night my sister and I could be found huddled together with a flashlight or a candle beneath a blanket fort or (my personal favorite) one constructed out of refrigerator boxes we obtained from a local furniture store. (An adventure in itself—imagine one of us carrying the box by walking beneath it while the other verbally directed so the one who couldn't see where they were going didn't get hit by a car. Don't ask why we chose to do things this way instead of carrying the box between us so we could both see. This was far more entertaining!)

​

     Inside these makeshift safe-havens from the things that go bump in the night (the ghosts couldn't get us as long as we remained inside our fort) I would craft the most frightening yarns I could think of. Most of these were told in the tradition of a good campfire story but we would also take turns reading from collections of short scary stories. (Alvin Schwartz's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark was our go-to.)

​

     It was from these sessions beneath the box that many of my original short stories came from and it was my sister who gave me the first real encouragement that I was actually any good at it. She didn't just inspire me to start. She inspired me to keep going!