Beyond the Page: Featuring Matthew Lasley
This week, we are excited to feature Matthew Lasley author of the latest picture book, Pedro’s Pan: A Gold Rush Story (Graphic Arts Books February 2019) on Beyond the Page. Get to know him through some fun questions below.
If you could only eat one food for a week, what would you pick?
Pizza of course. Pizza is good cold or hot, morning or night.
What did you want to be growing up?
I wanted to be an archaeologist/geologist. I love the past and how little we really know if it.
What fictional place would you most like to go?
This is a tricky one since the place I want to go is not fictitious, but our history of it is. I would want to go see Atlantis and what it really was so I could find it today.
Tell us one fun insider-fact about PEDRO’S PAN, your first book.
I learned to pan for gold when I was seven years old. My dad would put BBs in a pan and make me pan them until I could pan both proficiently and quickly. He then set me to work on our gold mine panning our concentrates and samples. In my life, I have probably panned more 25,000 pans of material.
Matthew Lasley
Matthew Lasley is the son of a gold miner in Alaska and the Klondike, and has spent many hours hunched over a gold pan, even in some of the same creeks that Felix Pedro once prospected. Lasley is now a writer and a first-grade teacher, and lives in Anchorage. You can learn more about him at
https://www.matthewlasley.com/.
