Educator hopes book inspires kids to read

It's amazing, the power of a Christmas gift.

For Matthew Kirby, author of "The Clockwork Three," the gift of the "Wizard of Earthsea" by Ursula K. Le Guin during his sixth-grade year was a life-changing moment. It's the book, he says, that inspired him to become a writer.

"I became aware of what words can do and what a story can do and how meaningful it could be," Kirby told the Deseret News. "It just inspired me to that degree."

Kirby, who works as a school psychologist at Mountain View Elementary School in the Davis School District, may have had the passion for writing as a youth, but that didn't parlay into success until much later.

Writing was something Kirby always had in the back of his mind as something he wanted to do, but it wasn't something he really seriously considered as a career option until his wife encouraged him to go for it. And that lit a fire.

It was another Christmas, and another present that helped Kirby move forward. This time, it was a laptop from his wife while they were both struggling students at Utah State University. The gift allowed Kirby to get more writing in while he was on campus.

At first, Kirby went through the typical cycle of writing, submitting and getting rejected. He wrote mostly adult science fiction and fantasy and experienced minor success along the way. But at some point, he realized that he was going in the wrong direction, the stories he wanted to write were the stories he wanted to tell kids.

And so he changed his focus.

Out of that change came the story of a musician, a maid and an apprentice clockmaker.

As an undergraduate study in history, Kirby spent a lot of time in the USU library. One day he found a book about child street musicians in late 19th century. Inside, there was a story about a boy named Joseph, or Giuseppe in Italian. Kirby did some digging and went to the archives of the New York Times and newspapers of the day and read more about the young musician.

"His story was just so compelling to me," Kirby said. "I knew I wanted to tell that story in some way. I didn't know whether it would be strict historical fiction or the inspiration for some other kind of story, but Giuseppe turned out to be one of the pieces of 'The Clockwork Three.' "

Giuseppe's story percolated for a while inside Kirby's head — during graduate school he had to put active writing aside. Meanwhile, the idea for two more characters, a maid and an apprentice clockmaker, were also simmering.