Rust Belt Hero

My guest on the show today is

John Pistelli

, proprietor of the

Grand Hotel Abyss

Substack newsletter and its affiliated lecture course, The Invisible College. John is also the author of the novel Major Arcana, which was originally serialized on Substack. It was then picked up and republished by Belt Publishing, an indie press (now under the auspices of Arcadia, a larger indie press) founded to promote voices from the Rust Belt.

We talk a lot of about John’s novel, which I enjoyed immensely, but we talk more about what the novel represents, and has led to, in terms of the arc of John's career and his public reputation. In a very modest way, he's blown up over the last year or two. He's one of the presiding sages of Substack. He's been mentioned, mostly favorably, in the New Yorker. He's been criticized respectfully in the Wall Street Journal and somewhat derisively in Compact magazine.

I ask him: What has that felt like? Is there discomfort in being the center of some attention when his sense of himself as a literary figure was forged as someone on the margins. Is he enjoying the attention? What does he make of the criticism he’s received? What was it like to travel to New York to launch the book? Was it as romantic as he made it sound?

I always find it a pleasure to talk to John. He has such a lively intellect, and you can feel him thinking his way through his answers as he's giving them, which is perhaps the main thing that makes for a good guest on the show.

Hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.