By day, Matt Landis is a middle school social studies teacher in Warrington, Pennsylvania; but by night (and, well, sometimes also by day…), he’s the author of some high adventure, high stakes, middle grade books.
Matt’s National Archives Hunters series features 10-year-old twins who become unofficial “consultants” who assist the FBI’s Art Crime Team to help find and recover stolen relics from history and beyond. Throughout the series, there is also an ongoing hunt for an elusive criminal mastermind.
Two books in this series are now available: National Archive Hunters: Capitol Chase and National Archive Hunters: Eternal Flame. In the former, twins Ike and Iris are in mad pursuit of a thief who’s stealing valuable artifacts; in the latter, the twins race from D.C. to Paris to New York to save one of America’s most iconic treasures.
All this running around is reminiscent of the author! Matt Landis has been on a whirlwind RV tour, taking his author-visit-extravaganza across the country. We were lucky to catch up with him for this interview!
Matt, we know a lot of teachers, so we have to start by finding out how a teacher is able to embark upon a cross-country author tour.
Two years ago, I hatched a secret plan to quit my job for a year and travel America with my wife and four kids in an RV. When I confessed this epic adventure to my bride, Kristy, she said, “No.”
To be fair, her main concern was valid: money. I’m a full-time middle school history teacher who writes middle grade books in the morning and late at night and on my 18-minute teacher lunch. Kristy, also a teacher, works part time at a PreK. We couldn’t exactly quit our jobs or afford an RV (much less drive one); my wife, though a woman of great patience, wasn’t keen on sharing a cramped living space for a prolonged period with our ten and eight year olds, much less our five-year-old twins.
And yet, last January to June, we pulled that adventure off. I cajoled a sabbatical out of my school district, found a used RV, YouTubed everything on the Internet, and built a seventy-school book tour to fund the work/vacation/adventure. From sea to shining sea we drove, laughed, cried, clogged the tiny RV toilet, and drank in the amazing America I’ve spent nearly two decades teaching about. Across twenty-five states, I ran hundreds of assemblies, high-fived forty-thousand kids, ran book orders, slung product, and met the most incredible educators. We hiked through canyons, sand boarded down desert dunes, stared up at Redwoods, gawked at blackout skies, and fed wild donkeys in South Dakota. We held a gator in Florida, where there are essentially no rules. We attended a rodeo in San Antonio, a state where four-year-old children regularly ride wild sheep in an event known as “Mutton Bustin’.” We survived a spring snow squall in New Mexico. We played tag on the Utah salt flats. We ate a lot of tacos.
That sounds like quite an adventure! You mentioned recording your travel escapades on Substack. Tell us a little more about that.
My biggest fear was forgetting the small moments, so I decided to narrate the adventure in a Substack podcast fabulously titled The Great American RV Family Book Tour. The goal was to capture the planning, launch, highs, lows, as well as the mundane that together make up a true adventure. Episodes featured locations and guests — friends we reunited with along the way, family we stayed with, my kids, Kristy. Production quality grew, helped by my decision to outline episodes instead of winging it. I finally had a great reason to buy some cool sound equipment.
What motivated you to use this medium, and what other platforms have you explored?
Little did I know that this travel pod experiment would be the starting point of another project — a student-centered history podcast for teachers, parents, and homeschool co-ops.
For the past eighteen years, my single mission in the middle school social studies classroom has been to make history not boring; I’ve been attempting the same in the middle-grade fiction space for a decade. My next frontier: Internet airwaves.
See, I love a stage. Whether my classroom of twenty-five students or a gym of five hundred rabid upper elementary kids, I come alive when bringing the past to life. “Start a history YouTube channel, bruh” you might suggest, which I considered. But I hate the screen addiction of phones and especially school laptops that have eroded my students’ ability to do meaningful things with their time. Because that’s my goal, too: use the time I have amidst my wild life to create meaningful content for educators and parents in the arena I love most.
So I’m going after it.
Wait – a podcast for kids? We definitely need some more details about that.
American Made is a history podcast for students in grades 3-7, positioned for teachers, parents, and homeschool parents to push-and-play. Purposefully on the shorter side (10-15 min), I explore the questions, stories, and struggles that built a nation using kid-friendly language, soundtracks, voice actors heralding primary sources, all while trying to muster the in-person humor and drama you’d get in my classroom. Original narrative appears as well, such as the Christmas special I wrote on Washington Crossing the Delaware. Supplemental resources, including editable handouts, sources, and ‘digging deeper’ ideas come with each episode, free, like the content itself. The short ad you hear in the middle of each episode is comedic — I made these products up. The “Overreactor Parental Zapper,” for example, is a dime-sized electrode that sticks to the back of an adult’s phone; when they overreact at their child’s soccer game, it sends a tiny shock through their body to remind them this is not the World Cup.
What is your goal for the podcast?
I’m not after views or likes or even money (okay, maybe some money) but primarily use. Could a classroom teacher deploy this episode during their unit on the American Revolution? Could a Gifted/GIEP teacher use it as enrichment? Could a parent play it in the car on the way home from dance or soccer pick-up and spark a conversation? Could a home school co-op position it as a model to create their own podcast? These questions drive my topics and outlines, as do my daughter’s feedback when listening to a draft recording. “Dad, it’s a little boring at this part,” she’ll announce, headphones on, while working on a posterboard for a school presentation on City Spies.
“You know, James Ponti and I are like, basically colleagues,” I remind her. No response.
With teaching, traveling, running author visits, and podcasting, it must be difficult to find time to write. Do you have any new books on the horizon?
Every artist — writers especially — battle legions of demons collectively known as Other Cool Ideas. I still have books in me that I want to write, including our family’s America Tour story; I actively harbor dreams of being the next Nicholas Sparks; maybe one day I’ll finish that historical rap album, to my children’s great shame. But in the year 2026, fittingly America’s 250th anniversary of Independence, I’m embarking on my own “Cause” as the Founders called it, a mission I began in 2007 when I walked into the social studies classroom: to help kids understand the past in a not horribly boring way. It’s for my readers, teachers, and parents who have already or might yet discover my brand of storytelling. If you’re reading this, it’s also for you.
And I would love to have you join me on this audio adventure.
Matt, thank you so much for taking the time to share your adventures – both real and fictional – with us. Before you run, please let us know where we can catch up with you!
Thanks for the interview! It’s great to share a little about myself and my books with your readers. For anyone interested in following me, here’s a list of all the places you can find me online:
Website: https://www.matthew-landis.com/
Instagram: @Matthew_Landis
TikTok: @authorlandis
X (formerly Twitter): @AuthorLandis
YouTube: @author.matthewlandis
Substack: @mattlandis
__________
Matthew Landis is a full-time Social Studies teacher at Tamanend Middle School in Pennsylvania where he seeks to slay boredom wherever it lurks in his classroom. He is married to an elementary teacher (highly recommended) whose wisdom helps him balance in teaching, writing, and life. He won Mississippi’s 2020 Magnolia Book Award and the ILA 2019 Teacher’s Choices Reading List Award. A four-time Junior Library Guild recipient, Matthew’s middle grade novel, “It’s the End of the World as I Know It,” was shortlisted for the Virginia Reader’s Award, the Missouri Truman Reading Award, Oklahoma’s Sequoyah Book Award, and the South Dakota Teen Choice Award. His MG novel “Operation Final Notice” is currently shortlisted for Washington State’s Sasquatch Award. He has four kids, thirty-five chickens, three cats, and loves tacos. He hasn’t slept well since 2015.
