Why did Matthew McConaughey Write a Book of Poetry?

Matthew McConaughey’s first poem? Well, it has a debatable origin. 

“The first poem I wrote, I won the seventh grade poetry contest. But I didn’t write it,” he tells PEOPLE, sharing a vintage McConaughey family anecdote. 

After showing his mom, Kay McConaughey, his poem, “She was like, ‘eh,'” he recalls. Kay, 93, the no-nonsense matriarch (who joins Matthew, 55, onscreen in the new AppleTV+ movie The Lost Bus) raised the stakes. “She pulled another [professionally written poem] out and goes, ‘How about this?’”

Young Matthew nodded: “I said, it’s good.”

“She says, ‘Write that,’” says Matthew, recalling initial confusion. “She goes, ‘Did you like it?’Yeah. ‘This mean something to you?’ Yeah. ‘Then it’s yours. Write that.’ And sign my name to it?”

“I did,” he admits with that classic McConaughey grin. “I won. So, straight plagiarism.” 

But poetry stayed with him, and Matthew continued to write as a young adult and throughout his years in the spotlight. This month he published Poems & Prayers (out now). Taken from his own journals, the prose he shares spans “times when I was on top of the world to times when I was lost,” he says.

The book also includes little wisdoms from his three children with wife Camila Alves McConaughey;  son Levi, 17 (who plays his onscreen son in The Lost Bus), daughter Vida, 15, and younger son Livingston, 12.

The Oscar winner, who released his bestselling memoir Greenlights in 2020, started to take writing prose more seriously in 1989 while abroad in Australia. “I was off in a distant land, had no friends, no nothing. It was me and me,” he says. “And I was writing poetry and trying to make sense of life, trying to just have a dialogue with myself.”

That effort was “solid, but very self-serious,” he says, though it would spark decades of written reflection. “I continued to write … sometimes it was aspirational to me, sometimes it was when I was in heavy doubt and was lacking belief. Sometimes I was very confused, frustrated and having nightmares that were turning into daymares.”

Though his writing had been private, a year ago “I started noticing I had a little cynicism seeping into my own point of view,” says Matthew. “And I swore to myself a long time ago, never become a cynic. I’ve seen too many people get older and go from skepticism to cynicism, and it’s an early death.” 

“I started to look around at the world around me and I wasn’t finding a lot of evidence to getting to believe more,” says Matthew, who began sifting back through his poetry. “I was like, well, let me look back and see what I got.”

Dotted with proverbs, his own musings and poetry he’s written in locales from Vietnam to Hollywood, Poems & Prayers is the star’s way of leaning into the poetry of life. Or as he says in the book’s introduction, a way to “put proof on the shelf for a season, and rhyme our way to reason.”

Take PEOPLE with you! Subscribe to PEOPLE magazine to get the latest details on celebrity news, exclusive royal updates, how-it-happened true crime stories and more — right to your mailbox.

Poems & Prayers is available now, wherever books are sold.