Matthew's Writings
First, Matthew loved to be read to. We started reading to him from the day he was born.... When he was a newborn, and I was nursing, I would read aloud Newsweek, the Star Tribune, A Prayer for Owen Meany, anything I was reading, to him.
Then, starting at the end of first grade, Matthew learned to read. Reading just clicked for him. He went from simple books with one sentence per a page to reading the Magic Treehouse series (we call them Jack and Annie books) on Easter weekend 2006. I took a bunch of pictures that weekend. I could see him changing before my eyes and I was fascinated, thrilled and indulgent. Now, he always had something to do....read a book! For awhile, he carried every book in the Jack and Annie series with him in a carpet bag we had (I think you can see it next to the chair in the photos). By mid-May, he was reading Harry Potter and there was no stopping him.
That is, until he realized that he, too, could write. He added to the list-making that he had started in early first grade to starting to write stories. He often would start with the Table of Contents and list each chapter he planned (only a few of which were ever written) and the number of pages he had planed for the book (mostly in the mid hundreds). Other times he would start by creating a list of all the books that were planned for the series. Eventually, he would write a few pages of the story. I am so lucky that I managed to pick some up and toss them in a basket on my desk because he was prolific and often the sheafs of paper that were floating around the house would get recycled. He imitated the authors he loved, specifically, JK Rowling. His first book series was about Zany Zaluna, a witch going to school, and her professor Lord Strallini.
Eventually, he decided he wanted to be a writer when he grew up. Here he is on Career Day 2008:
Selected Writings
I hope to put up examples of his writing, and I will start with some he wrote shortly before he died.
These are poems he wrote with his spelling words instead of writing a story: Poems written October 9, 2008. Seriously, what 9 year old writes poems unless they have to?
Here is an amazing story we found in a little 3 inch by 4 inch notebook: The Sacred Garden of Time. Matthew had so many notebooks of all shapes and sizes. They were for his personal writing and list making, not for school, so when we found this in his room after he died, we were blown away.
