About this episode
Author of the popular series "City of Spies" and "Framed!", James Ponti shares the movies that influenced him, how locations inspire his work, and his transition from movies and television to kidlit.
"I go to the locations in the books when I can, and I go there and I scouted them when I was shooting documentaries. I'll kind of walk around the same way I did for years producing television to really figure out the best way to take advantage of a location." - James Ponti
As a child, James Ponti was not a reader. Instead, he discovered an interest in storytelling through film. James’ mother’s own love for movies, coupled with her artistic career piqued his curiosity about the life of a creative. Throughout his 25 years of experience in visual media, James continued to master his understanding of storytelling techniques, characters, and worldbuilding. Additionally, location scouting for the screen would go on to inspire some of the backdrops for his most famous works.
James’ unique perspective from his start in visual storytelling allowed him to become the immersive, illustrative author that he is today.
This episode's Beanstack featured librarian is Kathleen Durant, the Librarian at Camden Middle School in Kershaw County, South Carolina. Listen to the end to hear her creative use for The Wheel of Names!
Contents
- Chapter 1 - The Great Escape (1:46)
- Chapter 2 - All The President’s Men (4:43)
- Chapter 3 - Santa’s Slay ‘79 (6:21)
- Chapter 4 - On The Hospital Floor (8:38)
- Chapter 5 - From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (12:25)
- Chapter 6 - In Good Company (24:37)
- Chapter 7 - Co-Conspirators (28:04)
- Chapter 8 - Mystery Author (31:33)
- Chapter 9 - Beanstack Featured Librarian (33:01)
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James Ponti:
Kids understand stories visually in a way that the books that were written in the old days of kids' books, which were very much like this affectation of, there was a boy, and he lived on a street. The street was so and so. And that's not how kids collect stories.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Growing up, James Ponti was not a reader. Instead of books, he found himself getting lost in the world of film and television. It's a world he spent 25 years of his adult life in. And now, as a writer of children's literature, he takes his experiences of that world with him.
James Ponti:
I go to the locations in the books when I can, and I go there and I scout them the same way I scouted them when I was shooting documentaries.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
James credits a lot of his success in literature to the storytelling techniques he learned and mastered from his time in visual media, and he tells us that he's not the only author using those strategies.
James Ponti:
All of these writers who people know, all started as scriptwriters.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
In today's episode, James shares those big names you definitely know, and he'll also share the exact techniques he's using from his time in television. And we'll learn why he believes writing with the screen in mind is so impactful in children's literature. My name is Jordan Lloyd Bookey. And this is The Reading Culture, a show where we speak with authors and reading enthusiasts to explore ways to build a stronger culture of reading in our communities. We dive into their personal experiences, their inspirations, and why their stories and ideas motivate kids to read more.
I want to take you back to a hot Floridian summer day in the 1970s. It's a Tuesday morning and a young James Ponti is taking his regular seat in the front row of a near-empty movie theater. This is where his writing education begins.
James Ponti:
And I would watch the movie, and because my brothers didn't want anything to do with me. I was too young, and my mom was busy. At the end of the movie, if I really liked it, I would just watch it again. So I would sit through it twice, and at a very young age realized the second time through, since I knew how the plot was going to turn out, I began to understand how they made the movie. And I began to understand story things.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
James is aware that the tough circumstances of his early life may seem like he had things pretty hard, but despite appearances, he recalls his youth in the small beach town quite fondly.
James Ponti:
We didn't have money, didn't have a dad. There's a lot of things we didn't have. So when you talk about that, it sounds sad. It was an incredibly happy childhood. The ocean was five blocks from my school, and my house was directly in the middle of them. And I could walk two and a half blocks, and I would be in school, which I loved. Or I could walk two and a half blocks, I'd be at the beach, which I loved. And swim in the ocean, and run up and down the sand forever, or ride bikes. And it was great.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, I've heard your mom played a pretty big role in making your childhood feel as magical as it did.
James Ponti:
My mother was extremely creative. She was a painter. And to make a living, she just one day opened a travel agency in our house. So we became a travel agency, everyone in the family was instantly conscripted into working for her. But she wanted to be a writer more than anything. She loved writing. She would send off book ideas to publishers. And when she passed, and I was going through her stuff, I found rejection letters. I think it gave her great happiness that writing was the thing that I decided I wanted to pursue.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
It was her love of film that resulted in his own habit of spending his days in the theater.
James Ponti:
The thing my mom loved the most to do was go to the movies. And since I was so much younger, I would go to movies that were way more mature content-wise. Not like sexually, but just stuff that other eight, nine-year-olds weren't going to go see. And I just loved it, and so my mom really responded to that too. So when I said, "I'm going to be a film major, a screenwriting major," my mom was on cloud nine. And everyone else was like, "You can't possibly be picking that as your major." And I'm like, "No, that's it." And my mom was like, "Absolutely. That's fantastic."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, I'm thinking about The Fabelmans, if you've seen it. And the dad like-
James Ponti:
Oh, yeah. No, that struck home.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
... why would you do-
James Ponti:
Yeah. That hit home a lot.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
But you had the mom. You had the mom and dad-
James Ponti:
That was only with the mom. I didn't have the-
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Right. You didn't have the brake pedal. I call the dad the brake pedal.
James Ponti:
Yeah. We didn't have that.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
James watched film after film, absorbing storytelling techniques, characters and world-building. But it was one movie in particular that set the rest of his life in motion, All the President's Men.
James Ponti:
So this is a movie about Watergate. It came out in 1976. So I was 10 years old. And my mom and brothers went to see it, and I went with them. And my brother said, "You're wasting a ticket on him to see this movie." It's about two reporters covering the Watergate thing, but mom's like... She didn't believe in babysitters, so it's like, "He's coming." So we go and we sit, and we watched All the President's Men. And at the end of it, I just have this look on my face. And my brother goes, "See, look at him." And I turned to my mom and I said, "This is the greatest movie of all time. We're staying." And I made my family sit and watch it back to back, which none of them ever did. They didn't like doing that. It was because I had heard about Watergate for years.
There was this constant grownup discussion that made no sense to me, that was so boring and so annoying, and how the president had quit and all these things. And it didn't make any sense to me. And in two hours, the world made sense to me. And I thought, "Isn't that great? This movie has explained what no one has been able to explain to me over the last two, three years. And not only that, the heroes of the movie are the writers." And that happened to be the year I had this amazing school teacher that I knew I wanted to be a writer. So I decided in fifth grade when I was 10 years old that I'd be a writer. And not one day, from that point on, did I ever want to be anything else.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Okay. So All the President's Men was a very big influence, clearly on your journey to becoming a writer, but I've also heard you talk a lot about the impact that your teachers had on your writing aspirations. So maybe you could share a little bit about those experiences.
James Ponti:
In middle school, I have this other fantastic teacher, and my life is littered with amazingly good teachers. This teacher, Mr. Tyree, and he loved movies like I did. So I loved him. And I had him for three years in a row. He taught gifted English, so I had them each year in middle school. And for a month or six weeks of each year, he would basically stop English and we would make a movie in class. And I wrote the movie every year, and then my last year in ninth grade, because we had junior highs middle schools back then... So in ninth grade my last year with him, I'm like, "This is it. I want to write scripts. I want to write movies or plays." And he looked at me and he said, "Write a play." And I'm like, "What?" He didn't ask the principal. He didn't ask my mom. He said, "If you write a play, we'll produce it." So I wrote a play for our class, and we produced it. And it was awful. It was so inappropriate.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
What was it called?
James Ponti:
I believe the exact title was Santa Slay 79. And it was a movie about terrorists taking over Santa Slay, midnight Christmas Eve. It was like, Airplane and all these silly comedies. And I played Jimmy Carter. I had a big role. I had to get there. There's a fistfight between Ayatollah Khomeini and an elf. There's machine guns. There's 30 things that a public school could not even come close to now. But I sat there all day, and I watched these kids as we produced it for the school. And different grades would come in, and they laughed at my stupid jokes. And I thought, "Oh. So maybe journalists or maybe plays or maybe movies." I thought about all these things. And to be honest, like I said, we didn't have much money growing up.
And I applied to three colleges, and I got into them. And depending on where I got the best financial aid, I was going to either be a major in journalism, playwriting or screenwriting. It was really down to that, and then the best... Everything came through for USC to go major in screenwriting. So I headed out to California. That was where the academic life took me.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
After his studies, James spent 25 years working in television. For the first decade of that, he was writing for children's shows with companies such as Nickelodeon, Disney, and PBS. While he enjoyed his work immensely, family obligations took his career on a different path.
James Ponti:
My oldest son was severely autistic and epileptic, and he needed care around the clock. When I was at a point where TV writing meant going back to California, we didn't think it was a good thing for him to change. So what I ended up doing is, I segued into producing television. So you can produce cable TV from almost anywhere. So I would do... I did a series for the History Channel and a series for Spike TV. Again, I loved it. It was great. I did Golf Channel and NBC Sports, but also I did three years of roller derby for Spike TV. I did all kinds of strange things, which all have come in very handy in my now... What I'm doing because I've learned about things I never would've learned about. But I missed the writing as I got further away from writing.
So I worked in television for about 25 years, but in that period, I started dabbing at the edge of books just partly to make extra money to pay for doctors, or tuition, or whatever, or because I missed... I wanted to scratch that writing itch, and I liked that. And then about 10 years ago, my wife and I had said, "We really need to take care of Alex." One of us was going to have to quit our day job. And I said, "It'll be better if I quit." She's a schoolteacher. Because I can write at home, but I just have to build up this book thing to see if that can be a thing that I can build enough to do to carry my weight in supporting us like that. That's when I started writing Dead City. Actually, I started writing Dead City on the floor of the children's hospital next to my son's hospital bed.
It was where we were, and it's just because I had to work, and I was watching him. But he's asleep. I had a computer, and I started working. Alex actually ended up passing away eight years ago, and it was a shock. It was not at all what anything indicated would be happening. But he had led me into this thing of writing these books. So I just kept doing it, and I feel like he's part of that. I keep him around by writing the books. That was a longer answer than you were looking for. I apologize.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah. No, I'm processing also about your... I did know that your son had passed away. Sorry, but I didn't realize that that was also... It's like very-
James Ponti:
It's central to this.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, and just knowing that was all the reason for your actually taking that leap is really heavy. From James' childhood and his love of movies, it's no surprise that he ended up writing stories for the screen himself. But his talent for writing novels wasn't always clear to him. In fact, as a kid, he hated reading books.
James Ponti:
It was a labor for me beyond anything else.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Reading just didn't come naturally to him. It was hard, and it took him a long time, and it made him feel like it just wasn't for him. Had he not found his love of stories through film, James may not have ever realized his own talent for telling stories. However, there was one novel that did get through to him. And in analyzing it now as an adult, he's come to understand why that book became the exception.
James Ponti:
Claudia knew that she could never pull off the old-fashioned kind of running away, that is running away in the heat of anger with a nap sack on her back. She didn't like discomfort. Even picnics were untidy and inconvenient. All those insects, and the sun melting the icing on the cupcakes. Therefore, she decided that her leaving home would not just be running from somewhere, but would be running to somewhere. To a large place, a comfortable place, an indoor place, and preferably a beautiful place. And that's why she decided upon the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
She planned very carefully. She saved her allowance, and she chose her companion. She chose Jamie, the second youngest of her three brothers. He could be counted on to be quiet, and now and then he was good for a laugh. Besides, he was rich. Unlike most boys his age, he had never even begun collecting baseball cards. He saved almost every penny he got. But Claudia waited to tell Jamie that she had decided upon him. She couldn't count on him to be that quiet for that long, and she calculated needing that long to save her weekly allowances. It seems senseless to run away without money. Living in the suburbs have taught her that everything cost.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Those are the opening paragraphs of E. L. Konigsburg's 1967 novel From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. The story follows two siblings who run away from home and shelter in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. The book was an outlier in James's reading experience as a kid. Instead of becoming a chore to keep pushing through, James was hooked, and his imagination had a place to wander just like it did when he watched movies.
James Ponti:
You're looking at one, two, three, four paragraphs at the start of a book, and we already have our main character. We already have our mission, our plan, whatever. We know the secondary character. But what's always great is when you have a character talking about the other character. You learn about both. So not only do we learn about Jamie, but we learn about Jamie and we learn about Claudia by what she thinks of Jamie. And I think that must have been why. I don't have a great memory of reading this book specifically when or even what grade it was. I just remember that I read it, and that I loved it.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah. I love that book so much myself. But I'm thinking that immediate engagement, that quality, you find it a lot in movies too. Right? Like, you're right in the action. Yeah?
James Ponti:
So the movie that I loved with a passion was Raiders of Lost Ark, which is famous for having the scene center of all scene centers, this rock boulder chase thing that you're eight minutes in. And what's great about that, that has nothing to do with the rest of the movie, but it has everything to do with everything that you care about. Raiders really changed the way movies were made because everyone then wanted this cold open that just grabbed you. So I think that's probably... That is the case. I don't have academic training beyond high school English of writing fiction, but I do have a lot of training in writing stream plays, and they stress that. They say the most important part of a script is usually the first five pages. So that probably rubbed off in there somewhere.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
But there was another film-connected choice that Konigsburg made for this novel. Something you'll notice that is very present in the novels that James writes today.
James Ponti:
I was a very well-behaved kid. The thought of running away, that's as much adventure as I could imagine, could never have done. But the thought of running away to someplace, and that's where, again, I think film connected choice that Elaine Konigsburg did such a great job. This isn't a running away, this is a running to. And the fact that she picked a real place that I could go see when I went to New York, that I could recapture, that I could visit, that the places she would talk about there, the fountain where they bathe, or the bathrooms where they hide, it just... Wow, it's so many great elements. It's so great. In college, I took a class in Shakespeare, so... Not Shakespeare, Hitchcock. Hitchcock is the film version of Shakespeare. I took this class in Hitchcock, and his movies almost always had scene set in famous locations. So you have Mount Rushmore, or the UN, or something like that.
I like that in my books. So I go to the locations in the books when I can, and I go there, and I scout them the same way I scouted them when I was shooting documentaries. A guy will go to the train station in Edinburgh, and I'll say, "Okay, where would I put the camera? Well, why are you picking that place to put the camera? Well, then that means that's where you should put the action." So the action's going to happen where we could cover it well. And how are the actors, or the characters, or whatever you want to call them, how are they going to get in the scene and move around? So I'll go, and I'll just walk around the same way I did for years producing television to really figure out the best way to take advantage of a location. And then I do that for the book. So I just, two days ago turned in the first draft of City Spies 5.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Do we get to know where that's going to be?
James Ponti:
Yeah, it's going to be Venice, Italy.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh, you're going to Italy? Okay.
James Ponti:
Yeah. Yeah. Went back to Venice, Washington DC and New York City. And the big climax takes place at the New York Public Library. So I wrote to the people. I got in touch. And my editor, my wife and I took a tour at the New York Public Library. Behind the scenes, and in all these rooms that we're not supposed to go in, and took all kinds of pictures. And I took scouting pictures just like I would for a shoot. And then at my computer, while I'm writing it, I'm pulling them up. And I'm like, "Oh, wait. That's right. That's right. We want to make sure to use that thing because that's really interesting."
Now for television, you're looking for something that's visually interesting. Here, you're looking for visually interesting, but also you can do a little backstory interesting. For example, at the New York Public Library, the thing that just stuck with me the most is there are seven stories of stacks of iron... I'm sorry. Steel bookcases that are empty because they realize that it's better to store them in a controlled environment underground. But they have to leave the bookcases up because the bookcases hold up the building.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
They supported the building?
James Ponti:
Right. They built beams and turned them into bookcases. And I was like, "Well, I've got to include that somehow, because some kid reading that, they're going to remember that."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
That sticks with you. The newest in your installment is the City of the Dead, and this took us to Egypt.
James Ponti:
Yes.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
But when you wrote it, I understand it was during the pandemic, so you couldn't actually go to do your research. You usually do.
James Ponti:
I don't really have the money just to say, "Hey, I'm going to go do research in Egypt." As much as I would like to, I would've tried to. But COVID made it impossible. I did a lot of research online, and I tracked down a lot of people. The great thing about the books being a little successful is that I can reach out to people, and they call back. So for Egypt, I went to Disney+, and I pulled up the National Geographic thing, and I'm like, "Who's the go to Egyptologist and these documentaries?" And I wrote her, and an hour later she wrote back and she's like, "Sure." So we did a Zoom, and I recorded it. So I'm like, "I'm not going to get to go there. Tell me about the airport. Tell me about the noise. Tell me about the inside the pyramid. What's it look like?"
So in this book, we talked about serious things. There's a break in at the British Museum that they do. There's a heist that they're sent to do in the British Museum, and then the story takes them into Egypt. And I got to just throw in there this very adult topic of, should the British Museum really have all these treasures that are from Egypt? And they argue about it, and it's played for humored parts. It's played, and it's not a messagey kind of thing. But it's like, I'm not going to shy away from that because I think that's a thing that a 12 year old is interested to know. It's like, oh, okay. That's a good point.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
James' film-inspired take on locations has been a standout tactic for his stories, and well-loved by so many kids. In fact, our next question comes from students of this episode's Beanstack featured librarian Kathleen Durant. When we spoke, I didn't know this episode would be with James Ponti, but in our conversation, Kathleen mentioned that she was currently doing a community read of City Spies. So naturally I reached out to see what questions she or her students have for James. The audio is a little muffled, but a kid's voice is always the best. The questions come from two students, Jessica and Brielle.
Student 1:
Did you go down into the Catacombs to research while writing City Spies?
James Ponti:
It was the trip to Paris that inspired the books. So my son was going to school in England for the year. He was at university there. So my wife and I went to visit. She'd never been to Europe, so we spent a week in London, in Paris. And that week became the retroactive research when I decided to write a book based on it. But I didn't know when I went, there's no way my wife would've stepped foot in the Catacomb. So we did not go, and that was her first time in Paris. And my son and I both knew that for three days, we have to do exactly what ever mall mom wants because she has dreamt of this moment her whole life. So no, we did not go into Catacombs. And then when we just went... When we were in Rome recently doing research and vacation. I said, "Well, they have Catacombs here." And she goes, "I'm still not going in them. I'm still not going underground where there's dead bodies."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
The second question is one that I bet people ask James often. I actually heard it from another student when I recently took my son to a visit James did here at our local Politics and Prose Bookstore.
Student 2:
Will there be a City Spies movie? We really want to see it.
James Ponti:
It's funny because my whole goal in life for so long was write a movie. We sold the rights, and stuff gets talked about. I don't know that anything will happen of it, but the funny thing in it is the agent... So I have a literary agent and then there's a film agent involved. And they're like, "With this deal, do you want to write the movie? Or you want to at least include in it that you get to write a draft of it and try it, and whatever?" And I said, "No." And as I said, no, there's a... The 18-year-old part of my brain is like, "You idiot." Like I said, it would be a fantasy if this came true, but it's like, actually that's not what I do now. And certainly, there's someone better at it. I want it to be great. I love these characters. So maybe there would be. We will see.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Is there anybody you imagine who would be cast as any of the character.
James Ponti:
I imagine people to help me write. Again, this is the casting part of me. Not because I think they should play it, but because... To remember, okay, this is the color hair they have, and I've said they're tall, and I'll say whatever. Who I imagined for mother is... My wife says she's absolutely wrong. She was so upset when I told her. I always imagined Eddie Redmayne.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh, really? So interesting. That's not how... But now, that'll be in my head.
James Ponti:
Eddie Redmayne or Tom Hardy, just really smart British actors. Monty, I imagine as Karen Gillan who was in Doctor Who and Guardians of the Galaxy, just because she's Scottish. And I'll remember her accent and the red hair. But I don't really imagine them. The only character who I've really imagined is Tru, who is the MI six agent who oversees them all, has from day one been Emma Thompson, in my head.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Writing for the screen has had a lasting impact on James's writing style overall. He believes the connection between visual writing and children's writing is more vital than some would realize. In fact, he's just one of the many authors in his writing community with a scripting background.
James Ponti:
Writing is a great community of friends and support. So I have a number of friends who are writers, who are really big kids writers, and we're in text groups and stuff. So Stuart Gibbs is one who writes the Spy School books. Gordon Korman is one who writes... He's written everything. He's written a 100 different books. Max Brallier writes Last Kids on Earth. Then there's Shannon Messenger who writes Keeper of the Lost Cities. I started in television with Suzanne Collins who wrote The Hunger Games, one of my oldest dearest friends in the world. It goes on. All of these writers who people know, all started as script Writers. Shannon Messenger, Victoria Aveyard and I all majored at different ages in the exact same very specific major at USC film school. Which when I was there, was the only country in the school that taught this.
Gordon Korman had already published five books by the time he went to college.
But when he got to NYU, he majored in film. Stuart Gibbs went to LA to be a television writer and film writer, and he still does that. I think there's just this golden era right now that we live of middle-grade fiction, and there's just so much going on in there. I think the influence of that... I think one of the positives is that people are coming at it from that background a little bit, which I'm sure, again, some people think is a negative. Oh, it's writing to... But kids understand stories visually in a way that the books that were written in the old days of kids' books, which were very much this affectation of, there was a boy, and he lived in a street, and the street was so and so. And this is like, that's not how kids collect stories.
So yeah, I think my story sense is built from film, and then translated to books. And by that, when you get down to stuff like three-act structure of film is probably pretty evident in my books. Even though books aren't traditionally taught to build that way. Most of those authors, that I mentioned, write in first person. I have two series written in first person. City Spies is not because I don't think it would've worked in first person. But first person is a natural thing for someone who's a scriptwriter because basically what it is, it's 500 pages or 300 pages of dialogue. So you're writing dialogue. You're not writing these esoteric things that bad English teachers in high school teach you about. The golden sun dipped into the boiling sea. Again, I don't... That's not how you write scripts. In scripts, you can only write what you see.
So we have that mentality, and then you want to add the other stuff. It's like, "Oh, wow. I can actually write how someone's feeling, or what they're thinking." But it's like, you treat it like dessert. Like, oh, I get to do that, which I didn't normally get to do. As opposed to some people who do that times a 100. And honestly, some people now... I think writing now is great across the board, but I think there was... I remember part of the reason I got turned off on books, it's just like, I can't get through this.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You are in Florida, which is the ground zero right now for so much controversy about books, and all these librarians are like, teachers are having to empty their shelves because they're worried about the books they have are not approved. Just this cultural moment of book banning and censorship, and everything. And I just wanted to know what your thoughts are, what you think because you are actually in the state.
James Ponti:
My wife teaches IB history and IB theory of knowledge, and she has really great students who go to amazing colleges and do great things after school. She's one of those wonderfully hard-loving teachers, and she has collected books from across the country, and other countries on our trips and stuff that she thinks will help them when they're writing these papers. She has four shelves just on Lincoln. There's not a single controversial thing in there. No one have a problem with any of them, but now she has to create a list that has to get approved, and she's probably got to take out her library in her classroom, at least for a year, to clear the books. And she's heartbroken. There's a state library group called FAME, Florida Association for Media in Education. They're fantastic. And they're all dedicated to this idea of knowledge, and information of books, and literature, and just helping kids. And to see them cast as villains is mind-boggling to me and heartbreaking to me because this is my home state.
I am a public school kid, who... I was able to find the life that I dreamt of having because I had amazing public school teachers along the way, shepherding me and not doing the things. I had a teacher who said, "Okay, write a play. You will do the play." And you couldn't do that now because the standards they have to keep, and this they have to keep, and the, well that's not part of the curriculum. But it was great the kids learned how to do it. I'm getting off track of that, but it's just, it's hard. Especially because it's my home, and I love it here, and I love the schools here.
The first author who really pulled me aside and gave me advice that wasn't someone who I already knew was Laurie Halse Anderson. And Lori and I were at a conference in Florida, and she pulled me aside. She said, "Here's the first thing to remember, James. We're not competitors, we're co-conspirators." But the conspiracy isn't, groom kids to do things. The conspiracy is, let's let kids have something other than screens, which I'm... I love screen. I've talked about movies and how much they impacted me. I love screens. But it's like, no, let's give them something where their imagination can go, and where they can be exposed. And it's just heartbreaking.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, I'm sure so many of your colleagues, so many people are impacted. So many authors are being impacted all the time, middle-grade authors.
James Ponti:
I also don't want to talk about other people's things because those are their stories to tell. But a lot of people saw when Jerry Craft was uninvited from a school. It's like, for New Kid?
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
I know.
James Ponti:
Seriously?
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
I know.
James Ponti:
And the most amazing thing is we're wrapping it in the vocabulary of freedom. We're out to protect freedom by eliminating it.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
For James's reading challenge, mystery author, he wants us to embrace the many perspectives of life by expanding our intake of authors and our intake of author's works.
James Ponti:
I didn't read growing up because I didn't think I could. And now I read less than I want to because so much of my time is writing books. Sometimes, when you're writing a book, it's hard to read another one and switch out of that. So what I have challenged myself to do, over the next year, is to read books by people who have not read any other book by that person. So expose myself to different voices. There are these books that you hear about and it's like, wow, that... Everyone seems to... I'll tell you one. Like, Christina Soontornvat, who I have read some of hers. But I mentioned it to friends and people didn't know, and then they tried one. They read, I think most of them, at the time, it was A Wish in the Dark.
And then it won the Newbery medal, and then they started reading her other books. And it's like, "Oh, wow. She's really been great all this time. And I just didn't, for whatever reason." Because there's so much. The great thing is, there's so many books now. There's such a wide variety of books for young readers. The hard thing is, we don't have time to read them all. So the challenge I would like to give is pick five authors you've never read. At least one or two who you've never heard of, and read one of theirs.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
And before we sign off, let's make sure to hear a little more from our featured librarian, Kathleen Durant, whose students you met earlier in the episode. Kathleen is an awesome librarian at Camden Middle School in Kershaw County, South Carolina.
Kathleen Durant:
I would say a secret sauce for middle school readers is to make it fun, is to have fun activities. They're really loving the bingo board format for challenges in Beanstack. I also do use the wheel of names frequently. I'll do the wheel of genre when they come in for their class visit to have the genres on a wheel. And then they take turns, go up and spin the wheel. And they have to pick out a book in whatever genre it lands on. And it's just like, it's fake. I have to get a romance book, and there's joy and exaltation. And then there's like, oh, poetry.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
This has been The Reading Culture, and you've been listening to our conversation with James Ponti. Again, I'm your host Jordan Lloyd Bookey, and currently I'm reading Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell and We Dream of Space by Erin Entrada Kelly. If you enjoy today's show, please show some love and rate, subscribe, and share The Reading Culture among your friends and networks. To learn more about how you can help grow your community's reading culture, you can check out all of our resources@beansstack.com. And join us on social media at The Reading Culture Pod for some very awesome giveaways. And be sure to check out The Children's Book Podcast with teacher and librarian Matthew Winner. It's a great book podcast made for kids ages six to 12, that explores big ideas and the way that stories can help us feel seen, understood and valued. You can find it wherever you listen to podcasts. This episode was produced by Jackie Lamport and Lower Street Media, and script edited by Josiah Lamberto-Egan. They'll be back in two weeks with another episode. Thanks for joining and keep reading.
Kids understand stories visually in a way that the books that were written in the old days of kids' books, which were very much like this affectation of, there was a boy, and he lived on a street. The street was so and so. And that's not how kids collect stories.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Growing up, James Ponti was not a reader. Instead of books, he found himself getting lost in the world of film and television. It's a world he spent 25 years of his adult life in. And now, as a writer of children's literature, he takes his experiences of that world with him.
James Ponti:
I go to the locations in the books when I can, and I go there and I scout them the same way I scouted them when I was shooting documentaries.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
James credits a lot of his success in literature to the storytelling techniques he learned and mastered from his time in visual media, and he tells us that he's not the only author using those strategies.
James Ponti:
All of these writers who people know, all started as scriptwriters.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
In today's episode, James shares those big names you definitely know, and he'll also share the exact techniques he's using from his time in television. And we'll learn why he believes writing with the screen in mind is so impactful in children's literature. My name is Jordan Lloyd Bookey. And this is The Reading Culture, a show where we speak with authors and reading enthusiasts to explore ways to build a stronger culture of reading in our communities. We dive into their personal experiences, their inspirations, and why their stories and ideas motivate kids to read more.
I want to take you back to a hot Floridian summer day in the 1970s. It's a Tuesday morning and a young James Ponti is taking his regular seat in the front row of a near-empty movie theater. This is where his writing education begins.
James Ponti:
And I would watch the movie, and because my brothers didn't want anything to do with me. I was too young, and my mom was busy. At the end of the movie, if I really liked it, I would just watch it again. So I would sit through it twice, and at a very young age realized the second time through, since I knew how the plot was going to turn out, I began to understand how they made the movie. And I began to understand story things.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
James is aware that the tough circumstances of his early life may seem like he had things pretty hard, but despite appearances, he recalls his youth in the small beach town quite fondly.
James Ponti:
We didn't have money, didn't have a dad. There's a lot of things we didn't have. So when you talk about that, it sounds sad. It was an incredibly happy childhood. The ocean was five blocks from my school, and my house was directly in the middle of them. And I could walk two and a half blocks, and I would be in school, which I loved. Or I could walk two and a half blocks, I'd be at the beach, which I loved. And swim in the ocean, and run up and down the sand forever, or ride bikes. And it was great.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, I've heard your mom played a pretty big role in making your childhood feel as magical as it did.
James Ponti:
My mother was extremely creative. She was a painter. And to make a living, she just one day opened a travel agency in our house. So we became a travel agency, everyone in the family was instantly conscripted into working for her. But she wanted to be a writer more than anything. She loved writing. She would send off book ideas to publishers. And when she passed, and I was going through her stuff, I found rejection letters. I think it gave her great happiness that writing was the thing that I decided I wanted to pursue.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
It was her love of film that resulted in his own habit of spending his days in the theater.
James Ponti:
The thing my mom loved the most to do was go to the movies. And since I was so much younger, I would go to movies that were way more mature content-wise. Not like sexually, but just stuff that other eight, nine-year-olds weren't going to go see. And I just loved it, and so my mom really responded to that too. So when I said, "I'm going to be a film major, a screenwriting major," my mom was on cloud nine. And everyone else was like, "You can't possibly be picking that as your major." And I'm like, "No, that's it." And my mom was like, "Absolutely. That's fantastic."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, I'm thinking about The Fabelmans, if you've seen it. And the dad like-
James Ponti:
Oh, yeah. No, that struck home.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
... why would you do-
James Ponti:
Yeah. That hit home a lot.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
But you had the mom. You had the mom and dad-
James Ponti:
That was only with the mom. I didn't have the-
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Right. You didn't have the brake pedal. I call the dad the brake pedal.
James Ponti:
Yeah. We didn't have that.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
James watched film after film, absorbing storytelling techniques, characters and world-building. But it was one movie in particular that set the rest of his life in motion, All the President's Men.
James Ponti:
So this is a movie about Watergate. It came out in 1976. So I was 10 years old. And my mom and brothers went to see it, and I went with them. And my brother said, "You're wasting a ticket on him to see this movie." It's about two reporters covering the Watergate thing, but mom's like... She didn't believe in babysitters, so it's like, "He's coming." So we go and we sit, and we watched All the President's Men. And at the end of it, I just have this look on my face. And my brother goes, "See, look at him." And I turned to my mom and I said, "This is the greatest movie of all time. We're staying." And I made my family sit and watch it back to back, which none of them ever did. They didn't like doing that. It was because I had heard about Watergate for years.
There was this constant grownup discussion that made no sense to me, that was so boring and so annoying, and how the president had quit and all these things. And it didn't make any sense to me. And in two hours, the world made sense to me. And I thought, "Isn't that great? This movie has explained what no one has been able to explain to me over the last two, three years. And not only that, the heroes of the movie are the writers." And that happened to be the year I had this amazing school teacher that I knew I wanted to be a writer. So I decided in fifth grade when I was 10 years old that I'd be a writer. And not one day, from that point on, did I ever want to be anything else.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Okay. So All the President's Men was a very big influence, clearly on your journey to becoming a writer, but I've also heard you talk a lot about the impact that your teachers had on your writing aspirations. So maybe you could share a little bit about those experiences.
James Ponti:
In middle school, I have this other fantastic teacher, and my life is littered with amazingly good teachers. This teacher, Mr. Tyree, and he loved movies like I did. So I loved him. And I had him for three years in a row. He taught gifted English, so I had them each year in middle school. And for a month or six weeks of each year, he would basically stop English and we would make a movie in class. And I wrote the movie every year, and then my last year in ninth grade, because we had junior highs middle schools back then... So in ninth grade my last year with him, I'm like, "This is it. I want to write scripts. I want to write movies or plays." And he looked at me and he said, "Write a play." And I'm like, "What?" He didn't ask the principal. He didn't ask my mom. He said, "If you write a play, we'll produce it." So I wrote a play for our class, and we produced it. And it was awful. It was so inappropriate.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
What was it called?
James Ponti:
I believe the exact title was Santa Slay 79. And it was a movie about terrorists taking over Santa Slay, midnight Christmas Eve. It was like, Airplane and all these silly comedies. And I played Jimmy Carter. I had a big role. I had to get there. There's a fistfight between Ayatollah Khomeini and an elf. There's machine guns. There's 30 things that a public school could not even come close to now. But I sat there all day, and I watched these kids as we produced it for the school. And different grades would come in, and they laughed at my stupid jokes. And I thought, "Oh. So maybe journalists or maybe plays or maybe movies." I thought about all these things. And to be honest, like I said, we didn't have much money growing up.
And I applied to three colleges, and I got into them. And depending on where I got the best financial aid, I was going to either be a major in journalism, playwriting or screenwriting. It was really down to that, and then the best... Everything came through for USC to go major in screenwriting. So I headed out to California. That was where the academic life took me.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
After his studies, James spent 25 years working in television. For the first decade of that, he was writing for children's shows with companies such as Nickelodeon, Disney, and PBS. While he enjoyed his work immensely, family obligations took his career on a different path.
James Ponti:
My oldest son was severely autistic and epileptic, and he needed care around the clock. When I was at a point where TV writing meant going back to California, we didn't think it was a good thing for him to change. So what I ended up doing is, I segued into producing television. So you can produce cable TV from almost anywhere. So I would do... I did a series for the History Channel and a series for Spike TV. Again, I loved it. It was great. I did Golf Channel and NBC Sports, but also I did three years of roller derby for Spike TV. I did all kinds of strange things, which all have come in very handy in my now... What I'm doing because I've learned about things I never would've learned about. But I missed the writing as I got further away from writing.
So I worked in television for about 25 years, but in that period, I started dabbing at the edge of books just partly to make extra money to pay for doctors, or tuition, or whatever, or because I missed... I wanted to scratch that writing itch, and I liked that. And then about 10 years ago, my wife and I had said, "We really need to take care of Alex." One of us was going to have to quit our day job. And I said, "It'll be better if I quit." She's a schoolteacher. Because I can write at home, but I just have to build up this book thing to see if that can be a thing that I can build enough to do to carry my weight in supporting us like that. That's when I started writing Dead City. Actually, I started writing Dead City on the floor of the children's hospital next to my son's hospital bed.
It was where we were, and it's just because I had to work, and I was watching him. But he's asleep. I had a computer, and I started working. Alex actually ended up passing away eight years ago, and it was a shock. It was not at all what anything indicated would be happening. But he had led me into this thing of writing these books. So I just kept doing it, and I feel like he's part of that. I keep him around by writing the books. That was a longer answer than you were looking for. I apologize.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah. No, I'm processing also about your... I did know that your son had passed away. Sorry, but I didn't realize that that was also... It's like very-
James Ponti:
It's central to this.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, and just knowing that was all the reason for your actually taking that leap is really heavy. From James' childhood and his love of movies, it's no surprise that he ended up writing stories for the screen himself. But his talent for writing novels wasn't always clear to him. In fact, as a kid, he hated reading books.
James Ponti:
It was a labor for me beyond anything else.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Reading just didn't come naturally to him. It was hard, and it took him a long time, and it made him feel like it just wasn't for him. Had he not found his love of stories through film, James may not have ever realized his own talent for telling stories. However, there was one novel that did get through to him. And in analyzing it now as an adult, he's come to understand why that book became the exception.
James Ponti:
Claudia knew that she could never pull off the old-fashioned kind of running away, that is running away in the heat of anger with a nap sack on her back. She didn't like discomfort. Even picnics were untidy and inconvenient. All those insects, and the sun melting the icing on the cupcakes. Therefore, she decided that her leaving home would not just be running from somewhere, but would be running to somewhere. To a large place, a comfortable place, an indoor place, and preferably a beautiful place. And that's why she decided upon the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
She planned very carefully. She saved her allowance, and she chose her companion. She chose Jamie, the second youngest of her three brothers. He could be counted on to be quiet, and now and then he was good for a laugh. Besides, he was rich. Unlike most boys his age, he had never even begun collecting baseball cards. He saved almost every penny he got. But Claudia waited to tell Jamie that she had decided upon him. She couldn't count on him to be that quiet for that long, and she calculated needing that long to save her weekly allowances. It seems senseless to run away without money. Living in the suburbs have taught her that everything cost.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Those are the opening paragraphs of E. L. Konigsburg's 1967 novel From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. The story follows two siblings who run away from home and shelter in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. The book was an outlier in James's reading experience as a kid. Instead of becoming a chore to keep pushing through, James was hooked, and his imagination had a place to wander just like it did when he watched movies.
James Ponti:
You're looking at one, two, three, four paragraphs at the start of a book, and we already have our main character. We already have our mission, our plan, whatever. We know the secondary character. But what's always great is when you have a character talking about the other character. You learn about both. So not only do we learn about Jamie, but we learn about Jamie and we learn about Claudia by what she thinks of Jamie. And I think that must have been why. I don't have a great memory of reading this book specifically when or even what grade it was. I just remember that I read it, and that I loved it.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah. I love that book so much myself. But I'm thinking that immediate engagement, that quality, you find it a lot in movies too. Right? Like, you're right in the action. Yeah?
James Ponti:
So the movie that I loved with a passion was Raiders of Lost Ark, which is famous for having the scene center of all scene centers, this rock boulder chase thing that you're eight minutes in. And what's great about that, that has nothing to do with the rest of the movie, but it has everything to do with everything that you care about. Raiders really changed the way movies were made because everyone then wanted this cold open that just grabbed you. So I think that's probably... That is the case. I don't have academic training beyond high school English of writing fiction, but I do have a lot of training in writing stream plays, and they stress that. They say the most important part of a script is usually the first five pages. So that probably rubbed off in there somewhere.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
But there was another film-connected choice that Konigsburg made for this novel. Something you'll notice that is very present in the novels that James writes today.
James Ponti:
I was a very well-behaved kid. The thought of running away, that's as much adventure as I could imagine, could never have done. But the thought of running away to someplace, and that's where, again, I think film connected choice that Elaine Konigsburg did such a great job. This isn't a running away, this is a running to. And the fact that she picked a real place that I could go see when I went to New York, that I could recapture, that I could visit, that the places she would talk about there, the fountain where they bathe, or the bathrooms where they hide, it just... Wow, it's so many great elements. It's so great. In college, I took a class in Shakespeare, so... Not Shakespeare, Hitchcock. Hitchcock is the film version of Shakespeare. I took this class in Hitchcock, and his movies almost always had scene set in famous locations. So you have Mount Rushmore, or the UN, or something like that.
I like that in my books. So I go to the locations in the books when I can, and I go there, and I scout them the same way I scouted them when I was shooting documentaries. A guy will go to the train station in Edinburgh, and I'll say, "Okay, where would I put the camera? Well, why are you picking that place to put the camera? Well, then that means that's where you should put the action." So the action's going to happen where we could cover it well. And how are the actors, or the characters, or whatever you want to call them, how are they going to get in the scene and move around? So I'll go, and I'll just walk around the same way I did for years producing television to really figure out the best way to take advantage of a location. And then I do that for the book. So I just, two days ago turned in the first draft of City Spies 5.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Do we get to know where that's going to be?
James Ponti:
Yeah, it's going to be Venice, Italy.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh, you're going to Italy? Okay.
James Ponti:
Yeah. Yeah. Went back to Venice, Washington DC and New York City. And the big climax takes place at the New York Public Library. So I wrote to the people. I got in touch. And my editor, my wife and I took a tour at the New York Public Library. Behind the scenes, and in all these rooms that we're not supposed to go in, and took all kinds of pictures. And I took scouting pictures just like I would for a shoot. And then at my computer, while I'm writing it, I'm pulling them up. And I'm like, "Oh, wait. That's right. That's right. We want to make sure to use that thing because that's really interesting."
Now for television, you're looking for something that's visually interesting. Here, you're looking for visually interesting, but also you can do a little backstory interesting. For example, at the New York Public Library, the thing that just stuck with me the most is there are seven stories of stacks of iron... I'm sorry. Steel bookcases that are empty because they realize that it's better to store them in a controlled environment underground. But they have to leave the bookcases up because the bookcases hold up the building.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
They supported the building?
James Ponti:
Right. They built beams and turned them into bookcases. And I was like, "Well, I've got to include that somehow, because some kid reading that, they're going to remember that."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
That sticks with you. The newest in your installment is the City of the Dead, and this took us to Egypt.
James Ponti:
Yes.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
But when you wrote it, I understand it was during the pandemic, so you couldn't actually go to do your research. You usually do.
James Ponti:
I don't really have the money just to say, "Hey, I'm going to go do research in Egypt." As much as I would like to, I would've tried to. But COVID made it impossible. I did a lot of research online, and I tracked down a lot of people. The great thing about the books being a little successful is that I can reach out to people, and they call back. So for Egypt, I went to Disney+, and I pulled up the National Geographic thing, and I'm like, "Who's the go to Egyptologist and these documentaries?" And I wrote her, and an hour later she wrote back and she's like, "Sure." So we did a Zoom, and I recorded it. So I'm like, "I'm not going to get to go there. Tell me about the airport. Tell me about the noise. Tell me about the inside the pyramid. What's it look like?"
So in this book, we talked about serious things. There's a break in at the British Museum that they do. There's a heist that they're sent to do in the British Museum, and then the story takes them into Egypt. And I got to just throw in there this very adult topic of, should the British Museum really have all these treasures that are from Egypt? And they argue about it, and it's played for humored parts. It's played, and it's not a messagey kind of thing. But it's like, I'm not going to shy away from that because I think that's a thing that a 12 year old is interested to know. It's like, oh, okay. That's a good point.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
James' film-inspired take on locations has been a standout tactic for his stories, and well-loved by so many kids. In fact, our next question comes from students of this episode's Beanstack featured librarian Kathleen Durant. When we spoke, I didn't know this episode would be with James Ponti, but in our conversation, Kathleen mentioned that she was currently doing a community read of City Spies. So naturally I reached out to see what questions she or her students have for James. The audio is a little muffled, but a kid's voice is always the best. The questions come from two students, Jessica and Brielle.
Student 1:
Did you go down into the Catacombs to research while writing City Spies?
James Ponti:
It was the trip to Paris that inspired the books. So my son was going to school in England for the year. He was at university there. So my wife and I went to visit. She'd never been to Europe, so we spent a week in London, in Paris. And that week became the retroactive research when I decided to write a book based on it. But I didn't know when I went, there's no way my wife would've stepped foot in the Catacomb. So we did not go, and that was her first time in Paris. And my son and I both knew that for three days, we have to do exactly what ever mall mom wants because she has dreamt of this moment her whole life. So no, we did not go into Catacombs. And then when we just went... When we were in Rome recently doing research and vacation. I said, "Well, they have Catacombs here." And she goes, "I'm still not going in them. I'm still not going underground where there's dead bodies."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
The second question is one that I bet people ask James often. I actually heard it from another student when I recently took my son to a visit James did here at our local Politics and Prose Bookstore.
Student 2:
Will there be a City Spies movie? We really want to see it.
James Ponti:
It's funny because my whole goal in life for so long was write a movie. We sold the rights, and stuff gets talked about. I don't know that anything will happen of it, but the funny thing in it is the agent... So I have a literary agent and then there's a film agent involved. And they're like, "With this deal, do you want to write the movie? Or you want to at least include in it that you get to write a draft of it and try it, and whatever?" And I said, "No." And as I said, no, there's a... The 18-year-old part of my brain is like, "You idiot." Like I said, it would be a fantasy if this came true, but it's like, actually that's not what I do now. And certainly, there's someone better at it. I want it to be great. I love these characters. So maybe there would be. We will see.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Is there anybody you imagine who would be cast as any of the character.
James Ponti:
I imagine people to help me write. Again, this is the casting part of me. Not because I think they should play it, but because... To remember, okay, this is the color hair they have, and I've said they're tall, and I'll say whatever. Who I imagined for mother is... My wife says she's absolutely wrong. She was so upset when I told her. I always imagined Eddie Redmayne.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh, really? So interesting. That's not how... But now, that'll be in my head.
James Ponti:
Eddie Redmayne or Tom Hardy, just really smart British actors. Monty, I imagine as Karen Gillan who was in Doctor Who and Guardians of the Galaxy, just because she's Scottish. And I'll remember her accent and the red hair. But I don't really imagine them. The only character who I've really imagined is Tru, who is the MI six agent who oversees them all, has from day one been Emma Thompson, in my head.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Writing for the screen has had a lasting impact on James's writing style overall. He believes the connection between visual writing and children's writing is more vital than some would realize. In fact, he's just one of the many authors in his writing community with a scripting background.
James Ponti:
Writing is a great community of friends and support. So I have a number of friends who are writers, who are really big kids writers, and we're in text groups and stuff. So Stuart Gibbs is one who writes the Spy School books. Gordon Korman is one who writes... He's written everything. He's written a 100 different books. Max Brallier writes Last Kids on Earth. Then there's Shannon Messenger who writes Keeper of the Lost Cities. I started in television with Suzanne Collins who wrote The Hunger Games, one of my oldest dearest friends in the world. It goes on. All of these writers who people know, all started as script Writers. Shannon Messenger, Victoria Aveyard and I all majored at different ages in the exact same very specific major at USC film school. Which when I was there, was the only country in the school that taught this.
Gordon Korman had already published five books by the time he went to college.
But when he got to NYU, he majored in film. Stuart Gibbs went to LA to be a television writer and film writer, and he still does that. I think there's just this golden era right now that we live of middle-grade fiction, and there's just so much going on in there. I think the influence of that... I think one of the positives is that people are coming at it from that background a little bit, which I'm sure, again, some people think is a negative. Oh, it's writing to... But kids understand stories visually in a way that the books that were written in the old days of kids' books, which were very much this affectation of, there was a boy, and he lived in a street, and the street was so and so. And this is like, that's not how kids collect stories.
So yeah, I think my story sense is built from film, and then translated to books. And by that, when you get down to stuff like three-act structure of film is probably pretty evident in my books. Even though books aren't traditionally taught to build that way. Most of those authors, that I mentioned, write in first person. I have two series written in first person. City Spies is not because I don't think it would've worked in first person. But first person is a natural thing for someone who's a scriptwriter because basically what it is, it's 500 pages or 300 pages of dialogue. So you're writing dialogue. You're not writing these esoteric things that bad English teachers in high school teach you about. The golden sun dipped into the boiling sea. Again, I don't... That's not how you write scripts. In scripts, you can only write what you see.
So we have that mentality, and then you want to add the other stuff. It's like, "Oh, wow. I can actually write how someone's feeling, or what they're thinking." But it's like, you treat it like dessert. Like, oh, I get to do that, which I didn't normally get to do. As opposed to some people who do that times a 100. And honestly, some people now... I think writing now is great across the board, but I think there was... I remember part of the reason I got turned off on books, it's just like, I can't get through this.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You are in Florida, which is the ground zero right now for so much controversy about books, and all these librarians are like, teachers are having to empty their shelves because they're worried about the books they have are not approved. Just this cultural moment of book banning and censorship, and everything. And I just wanted to know what your thoughts are, what you think because you are actually in the state.
James Ponti:
My wife teaches IB history and IB theory of knowledge, and she has really great students who go to amazing colleges and do great things after school. She's one of those wonderfully hard-loving teachers, and she has collected books from across the country, and other countries on our trips and stuff that she thinks will help them when they're writing these papers. She has four shelves just on Lincoln. There's not a single controversial thing in there. No one have a problem with any of them, but now she has to create a list that has to get approved, and she's probably got to take out her library in her classroom, at least for a year, to clear the books. And she's heartbroken. There's a state library group called FAME, Florida Association for Media in Education. They're fantastic. And they're all dedicated to this idea of knowledge, and information of books, and literature, and just helping kids. And to see them cast as villains is mind-boggling to me and heartbreaking to me because this is my home state.
I am a public school kid, who... I was able to find the life that I dreamt of having because I had amazing public school teachers along the way, shepherding me and not doing the things. I had a teacher who said, "Okay, write a play. You will do the play." And you couldn't do that now because the standards they have to keep, and this they have to keep, and the, well that's not part of the curriculum. But it was great the kids learned how to do it. I'm getting off track of that, but it's just, it's hard. Especially because it's my home, and I love it here, and I love the schools here.
The first author who really pulled me aside and gave me advice that wasn't someone who I already knew was Laurie Halse Anderson. And Lori and I were at a conference in Florida, and she pulled me aside. She said, "Here's the first thing to remember, James. We're not competitors, we're co-conspirators." But the conspiracy isn't, groom kids to do things. The conspiracy is, let's let kids have something other than screens, which I'm... I love screen. I've talked about movies and how much they impacted me. I love screens. But it's like, no, let's give them something where their imagination can go, and where they can be exposed. And it's just heartbreaking.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, I'm sure so many of your colleagues, so many people are impacted. So many authors are being impacted all the time, middle-grade authors.
James Ponti:
I also don't want to talk about other people's things because those are their stories to tell. But a lot of people saw when Jerry Craft was uninvited from a school. It's like, for New Kid?
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
I know.
James Ponti:
Seriously?
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
I know.
James Ponti:
And the most amazing thing is we're wrapping it in the vocabulary of freedom. We're out to protect freedom by eliminating it.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
For James's reading challenge, mystery author, he wants us to embrace the many perspectives of life by expanding our intake of authors and our intake of author's works.
James Ponti:
I didn't read growing up because I didn't think I could. And now I read less than I want to because so much of my time is writing books. Sometimes, when you're writing a book, it's hard to read another one and switch out of that. So what I have challenged myself to do, over the next year, is to read books by people who have not read any other book by that person. So expose myself to different voices. There are these books that you hear about and it's like, wow, that... Everyone seems to... I'll tell you one. Like, Christina Soontornvat, who I have read some of hers. But I mentioned it to friends and people didn't know, and then they tried one. They read, I think most of them, at the time, it was A Wish in the Dark.
And then it won the Newbery medal, and then they started reading her other books. And it's like, "Oh, wow. She's really been great all this time. And I just didn't, for whatever reason." Because there's so much. The great thing is, there's so many books now. There's such a wide variety of books for young readers. The hard thing is, we don't have time to read them all. So the challenge I would like to give is pick five authors you've never read. At least one or two who you've never heard of, and read one of theirs.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
And before we sign off, let's make sure to hear a little more from our featured librarian, Kathleen Durant, whose students you met earlier in the episode. Kathleen is an awesome librarian at Camden Middle School in Kershaw County, South Carolina.
Kathleen Durant:
I would say a secret sauce for middle school readers is to make it fun, is to have fun activities. They're really loving the bingo board format for challenges in Beanstack. I also do use the wheel of names frequently. I'll do the wheel of genre when they come in for their class visit to have the genres on a wheel. And then they take turns, go up and spin the wheel. And they have to pick out a book in whatever genre it lands on. And it's just like, it's fake. I have to get a romance book, and there's joy and exaltation. And then there's like, oh, poetry.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
This has been The Reading Culture, and you've been listening to our conversation with James Ponti. Again, I'm your host Jordan Lloyd Bookey, and currently I'm reading Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell and We Dream of Space by Erin Entrada Kelly. If you enjoy today's show, please show some love and rate, subscribe, and share The Reading Culture among your friends and networks. To learn more about how you can help grow your community's reading culture, you can check out all of our resources@beansstack.com. And join us on social media at The Reading Culture Pod for some very awesome giveaways. And be sure to check out The Children's Book Podcast with teacher and librarian Matthew Winner. It's a great book podcast made for kids ages six to 12, that explores big ideas and the way that stories can help us feel seen, understood and valued. You can find it wherever you listen to podcasts. This episode was produced by Jackie Lamport and Lower Street Media, and script edited by Josiah Lamberto-Egan. They'll be back in two weeks with another episode. Thanks for joining and keep reading.