ABSTRACT
This title incorporates the first words of a brief transatlantic telephone call from my grandson, Dylan, who was just one month short of his 8th birthday. His claim may still rest on the fragile evidence of scattered pieces of paper on his bedroom floor and the energetic filling of a notebook with page after page of boldly scrawled conversations and descriptions. But many adult novelists do the same and Dylan is bouncing with literary pride. He has come a long way in the years since his birth when he first shared picture books with his immediate family and learnt about the roles of readers and the significance of pictures and print (Whitehead 2002). Dylan’s own literacy history can best be summed up as one of meeting joyful challenges on a passionate pilgrimage from reading people and pictures to reading words and the world (Freire and Macedo 1987). There is nothing unusual about this story and Dylan is an ordinary little boy bursting with physical energy and enthusiasm for cycling and football, skateboarding and basketball, computer games and chess. However, he does have a family who believe in him as a reader and writer, share their own literacy activities with him and have always held firmly to the view that all young children require time, confidence, interested adults and enjoyment if they are to become readers and writers – or even novelists.
