Friends,
I have a few things left to say about facts and feelings after last week, but I’ll let those thoughts simmer a little longer. Today I’m sharing what will likely be the last of my 2024 interviews.
is the author of the forthcoming novel Major Arcana (Belt Publishing, 2025) and the bestelling Substack , home of a regular newsletter called Weekly Readings and the literary podcast The Invisible College. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Minnesota and has been writing and teaching for almost two decades. He lives in Pittsburgh, PA.Many of you know that John first serialized Major Arcana on Substack. He is the first Substacker that I know of to have parlayed a self-produced serial into a book deal. But we cover quite a lot more than that in this wide-ranging conversation. As always, we’d both love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
Josh
I was walking around outside and I'm kind of near a college neighborhood. And for two blocks, some garbage was blowing down the street and part of the garbage was photocopies with pink highlights of photocopies from a book that had obviously been distributed in class. And I was like, what is this? And I bent over and read some of it, and it was Pierre Bourdieu, the great sociologist of taste, and his work is just blowing down the street as garbage. And I'm trying to understand my need for distinction and how I've manipulated it.
A Conversation with John Pistelli
Joshua Doležal: The title of my series, The Recovering Academic, is a distinguishing detail between us because you are still teaching, you're still in academe. But I know generally that some of our discontents overlap, so I'm curious about your path to where you are now, how you ended up at the University of Minnesota.
John Pistelli: I never really thought of myself as being an academic. The plan was always to be a writer, to be a novelist. And in retrospect, I don't really understand why I never got an MFA. And maybe I should have done that in the midst of all of this protracted education. But I always had certain…not even discontents, as if I had a critique. It was just my sensibility is not necessarily fully a scholarly one, or a theoretical one, or an abstract one. And I was never good at specialization, and so there is a way in which I did get the PhD as a way of just prolonging: I'm going to write, I'm going to keep writing, et cetera, et cetera.
Joshua Doležal: So you've thought of yourself as a writer from an early age and you've really just stuck to that path and accepted some sacrifices or more modest means in order to make that art possible. You've sustained that over a decade for other projects that you produced yourself. And that leads us to Major Arcana. Now I saw this initially as a part of your Substack. So you've been a Substacker, I think, around the same time as I started. Two and a half years or so. Does that sound right?
John Pistelli: Yeah. I started in 2022.
Joshua Doležal: Tell me about your conception for Major Arcana and why you thought Substack was a good fit for it. Because you serialized it from the start, right?
John Pistelli: I'm always looking for ways to take what worked in the past and bring it in to a kind of usable present. So I thought, well, this seems to be a good platform for serializing a novel, given that the novel has always been a serial form. Even novels you wouldn't think were serialized, like Ulysses, you know, no cliffhangers, but it was serialized. Something that was a big part of my early life was that I read comic books and graphic novels from a very young age. My father had been a fan and transferred that to me. I got away from them for a while, but then most of the classes I teach at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design are about comics and graphic novels. So I'd always wanted to do a novel that would sort of pick up where the adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon left off. That kind of ended in the fifties, but there were a lot of interesting things that happened in the comic book world after that. So I did this multi-generational saga where you have the late 20th century occultist comic book writer in the 90s, and then you have the person – She or whatever ends up being her pronoun by the end of the book – She who may be his daughter and may not be in her work as an online occult influencer in the present. So that's the basic setup.
Joshua Doležal: How did it work when you rolled it out on Substack? I know that all of us are weighing these projects and trying to think about not just what we want to put out, but what our readers will find engaging and worth supporting. And I've heard that fiction is really hard to promote on Substack. It's pretty slow growth. It’s kind of a gamble. So how did that go for you?
John Pistelli: So I have one piece of bad news and two pieces of good news. So the bad news is that it wasn't much of a success as far as driving paid subscriptions. I had a very hard core of readers who were very into it. And that was about 30 paid subscribers. So that's the one piece of bad news. Serializing fiction is very hard on Substack. I don't know why. Maybe it's me. Maybe other people have had better luck. I know there have been people doing different kinds of projects that seem to have had better luck. Maybe mine wasn't commercial in that way.
But there are two pieces of good news, which is that through word of mouth, particularly from our fellow Substacker,
, who did an interview with me once I had initially self-published the novel, word got around that the people who did read it thought it was a very impressive novel. Eventually it was picked up by a real publisher the distinguished small press Belt Publishing, which is based here in Pittsburgh. And they are going to publish it in April 2025 with full marketing and it'll be in bookstores. In that sense, it's my first real novel, I guess you could say. What I've learned from the manifestation influencers is you should always have a positive attitude, but being very realistic I don't expect it to be a bestseller. But it is a real book. And that will hopefully, I believe, open some doors.And then the other piece of good news is that I started offering courses in literature on a paywalled podcast. And so far we've gone through British literature from the romantics to the modernists. We did a summer reading on Ulysses and Middlemarch. We're doing American literature. Now we're about to do Moby Dick and that has been more successful. In fact, today I reached my 100th paid subscriber. And if you consider what I'm doing, essentially I'm offering what would amount to three classes and I'm almost making the amount of money I'd make for adjuncting three classes. So it's working pretty well. So that's the other piece of good news, which is fiction doesn't work on Substack, but people want literary discourse.
Joshua Doležal: Well, congrats. That's always exciting to cross that bestseller threshold. So the traditional press Belt Publishing found you, and I don't mean to be a troublemaker, but I do want to press on this question of why that's worth it. I've been wrestling with this myself, and I know there are multiple opinions about this. So
published a post that I'm sure you've seen about why she left traditional publishing, even though she had a book deal with a traditional press some years ago. also has made that choice, even though he like Eleanor had a traditional book deal and chose to self-produce The Requisitions, which came out around the time that you launched your project. So the line of thinking for the independent publishing movement goes that with the traditional press, you forfeit basically 80 percent or more of your earnings. You also give up creative rights. So you can't use this yourself anymore or issue a new edition on your own – that belongs to the press. And if you flip it around, getting access to bookstores really just requires you to have an imprint and you can then go through IngramSpark and you could do it the same way that you had with your other four with very minimal overhead, have a lower distribution, but potentially a higher profit margin.And this is in some corners of Substack is being seen as kind of the new wave. This is the future for artists is to reclaim their creative lives and just take control of the means of production. So why was it worth it to you to go the traditional path, even though you're probably not going to make much money on it?
You keep using the word “real” book which I assume has something to do with it.
John Pistelli: I want to preface everything I'm about to say with: I sympathize with everything you've just said about independent publishing, and there's a reason I did go that route for so long, and was fully intending to keep on that path. My first three books still are self-published as of now, and I'm still selling them. So part of why I decided to do it when
of Belt Publishing called me and asked me to do it was – maybe this is a bad answer, but I was kind of curious, like I've done the independent publishing, what's this going to be like? There are book designers, there are marketers, apparently there are publicists. There are things I've never had access to, and I've heard maybe that it's not worth the tradeoff of independence, but maybe it is, I don't know. I thought, well, I’ll try this new experience, I'll see what it's like.I liked that it is based in Pittsburgh, some of the novel is set, I don't use real place names in the novel, I have this conceit of using comic book type names, so I call it Steel City, but part of the novel is set in Pittsburgh, as some of my earlier ones. I don't want to speak for Anne, but my impression is she had mostly been publishing nonfiction and had wanted to move into fiction and seemed to have a kind of ambition to recruit writers. And also we had a conversation about editing because, you know, Belt is a progressive publisher.
The novel takes on gender identity in I think an independent and free thinking way. I wouldn't say it's of the left or the right. And we had a conversation about that. You know, I've not been in any way suppressed. So those were a couple of the reasons.
You're right about the money. But again, unless I'm wrong, I don't know that this is going to be that kind of success. I think it could be a critical success or success of esteem. You're right about the bookstores. My impression is that because I am still adjuncting, I'm not totally out of academia, that having that on your CV opens certain teaching doors that weren't open to me before I have been dabbling with this idea on Substack. I don't know how serious it is, though it is something Anne and I have discussed, is that it opens doors potentially to moving into other media. So Anne has had books published by Belt that have had film options and TV options, which I don't think they're quite ready to do with self-publishing yet unless you've done some kind of pornography a la Fifty Shades of Grey.
Joshua Doležal: So more opportunities opening up and you said something about a success of esteem and this has kind of been the main barrier for me, honestly. I'm producing a poetry collection this fall, largely because I believe in it. I've honed the poems over many years, many of them appeared in very selective journals. But I know it's not going to win a contest. It's about three summers that I spent as a wilderness ranger in Idaho. And I know from looking at contests and the winners, this is not something that would be seen as a winner in most of those contests. So my choice is either to leave it on the shelf or put it out into the world.
So that's a fairly easy decision. My novel is a different kind of question because, as you say, when you produce it yourself, it's the sound of one hand clapping. You are generating all the buzz. You really do need to get some kind of a break with someone else signing on to it, even if they're not a traditional curator. You can't create all of that yourself necessarily. I guess some people can if they're if they're savvy enough or if they have enough of a following. But the question of esteem is perhaps the most vital one. Those of us who've come through any kind of traditional literary apprenticeship, it is the esteem of others that marks achievement. Yet artists for generations have scorned that, artists for generations have thought of their process, their creativity, as necessarily free – and free particularly of the critics. It's a convention among writers not to read the reviews because it can really screw you up. So, I guess I want to probe that: why is it that that we're so stuck on this question of esteem and need others to tell us that our work is worthy?
John Pistelli: It's a good question. I don't know how to answer it directly. So I'm going to answer it indirectly. One part of my biography I kind of left out was that after I got the PhD and was adjuncting, one of the things I did was around 2012. I decided to really have a strong online presence. And so I had a website, I still do at WordPress, that was book reviews. Or really, not really reviews, they were more essays, like on classics and things like that. So starting about 2012, 2013, 2014. And I maintained that very regularly for about 10 years along with a bit of a presence on Tumblr, on Goodreads, and so I did accrue a bit of a following there so when I was self publishing the novels, I wasn't quite coming out of nowhere with them.
I had kind of a web presence and a defined personality on the Internet and it's interesting because now I'm hearing from people who are much younger, who had started reading me when they were in high school and are under the misapprehension that I'm some kind of Harold Bloom or George Steiner figure because of this somewhat falsely authoritative pose I struck on this website.
But my point is, I was a critic, and I sort of cast myself as a critic, and as some kind of a gadfly like critical personality that accompanied the novels. This all sounds very cynical, I didn't mean it to be that way, I'm sort of retrospectively constructing it. But like, I post my Goodreads reviews and I review the reviews, and if it's a bad review, I explain why what they've identified as flaws are actually virtues. I mean, I can't live in that 20th century world that those people lived in because we just don't live in that world. I have to be engaging at least once a week.
It's funny, right before I was walking around outside and I'm kind of near a college neighborhood. And for two blocks, some garbage was blowing down the street and part of the garbage was photocopies with pink highlights of photocopies from a book that had obviously been distributed in class. And I was like, what is this? And I bent over and read some of it, and it was Pierre Bourdieu, the great sociologist of taste, and his work is just blowing down the street as garbage. And I'm trying to understand my need for distinction and how I've manipulated it. I don't know if that answers your question, but I think part of it is that the way I've handled it is I kind of – what's the phrase from Wordsworth? You have to create the taste by which you are to be enjoyed. So I've tried to do that with my web presence for about a decade now.
Joshua Doležal: Well, I've wondered personally, whether in the absence of traditional publishers and volumes like the Best American series and so on, you know, how is it that we measure achievement? Are we really truly left to our own inner compasses?
Is there a mark that we can aim at that is kind of universally, or at least within a certain community, recognized, or are we all kind of making up, as you said, the taste as we go? I think this is still a question. If Substack is successful in disrupting the traditional publishing industry, as it claims to aspire to do, then we might have this expanded freedom where everyone faces fewer constraints, there are no gatekeepers holding them out. It's free to everyone, but then within that freedom is a lack of coherence about how to articulate what it is you've achieved or even know yourself what the mark is that you're aiming at.
John Pistelli: Yeah, I mean to get academic about it, if not recovering academic, I guess I've always accepted the view of a T.S. Eliot or Harold Bloom that aesthetic standards are essentially internal to traditions. And so and in some ways that's not satisfying because it's still very contingent, but insofar as aesthetic standards are inherent to traditions, then you are judged by the tradition you affiliate with. And so that's maybe where part of my role as a critic comes in, is that I've staked out a certain constellation of taste in which I'm inviting people to place my own work. I'm as relativistic as anybody in 2024. I can't claim it's the only canon of taste there possibly is. And I don't think it's a very exclusive one. I'm not a cultural conservative in that sense, but I've kind of demarcated where I want to be in that, and it's up to others if I've met that standard. I can't be the judge of that, but I've shown them the yardstick.
Joshua Doležal: Well, I know that most of us don't spend a lot of time defining what our taste is or giving it in bullet points. Here are the four pillars of what I aspire to do as a writer. But do you have some sense of that? You know, when you're reading something and trying to articulate beyond just I like it or I hate it. Are there patterns or conventions? Are there craft tools that you're drawn to? How do you define your sensibility?
John Pistelli: It's something I wouldn't want to define too solidly because hopefully it changes through your life. This term romantic realism is a term I've been using and I think a couple other people like Ross Barkan have picked it up and I kind of intended it as it seemed for a lot of this century so far, that there's been this bifurcation of contemporary fiction, of autofiction, which everybody knows about.
I have nothing against writing autobiographically. It was more the style that seemed to attract this affectless, colorless, first-person monologue that to me derived from a lot of exhausted European models. And then on the other side, there's of course been the legitimation of genre fiction, which is fine, but it seemed like all novels were either about somebody inventing a time machine to investigate historical trauma or somebody who couldn't get out of bed and scrolling their phone and vaping all day or something. Some of my favorite older writers are Dickens or Hawthorne or among the modernists, ones like Mahn or Joyce, even though he does write autobiographically, there's a great deal of invention, or Saul Bellow or Iris Murdoch or Toni Morrison or Don DeLillo and if that seems like a very diverse company, what they have in common is the story is realistic, but the treatment is inventive and often on the verge of some kind of fantastical revelation. And so it's not simply a depressed autobiography nor is it a flight of fancy, but it is an imaginative transfiguration of our reality. That's really what I tried to do with all the novels I've written since Portraits and Ashes, which I published in 2017. So I would maybe try to define my taste that way. Obviously there are outliers. People are always surprised to find that I like certain things. I love Joan Didion. She seems like a depressive person who can't get out of bed, but I think she's a genius. You don't want these things to be rigid.
Joshua Doležal: But you have a sense of yourself as part of a community where there is discernment that sets an artistic standard. And for you I won't recall this perfectly, but “imaginary configurations of our reality,” I think is your phrase for romantic realism.
So there's a fanciful element of that, perhaps a marriage of Hawthorne and say Ambrose Bierce. But that is a craft standard. And the complaint about traditional publishing is that there is very little of that anymore. It's much more about guaranteed return on investment. It's about market share. It's about cult of personality. If you're a celebrity, you get the memoir deal — a little bit more democratic for debut novelists, perhaps, because of the potential for things like movie deals. But even there, if you have some kind of a social presence, that's an asset as opposed to being evaluated purely on craft alone. So I guess that's a convoluted way of asking what faith you have in the future of literature and publishing in the U. S. to hold new work to a high aesthetic standard. Or am I revealing myself to be a dinosaur by caring about that at all?
John Pistelli: It's a good question. I try to be as romantic as realism allows because one of the problems I ran into when I started trying to get a traditional publisher in 2013 with my novel Portraits and Ashes… I got some response. I got some bites from agents. But I know there's been a lot of discourse about wokeness and ideology and things. And that's real. I think we're past the peak of that, but what I was seeing in 2013 before that was a very intense desire to compete with television. Like agents saying, I want The Wire as a book. In that sense, I agree with you that there's been a lack of concern with what literature can do that other media can't, which does necessarily involve some kind of innovation with language or defamiliarization of narrative that isn't just going to mimic popular narratives. I think people who are concerned with that are going to be more and more a coterie. This is in many ways returning to something more pre-modern where there will be coteries and courts in some metaphorical sense. I hope not a literal sense. I think the age of the big bestseller of however many copies a Bellow or an Updike sold, that's probably gone.
Joshua Doležal: Is something like Samizdat too hyperbolic for you?
John Pistelli: Maybe a little too hyperbolic. I think more I'm trying to think of a good model, more of a modernist model, little magazines and semi-private publishers. We could all be behind a fence by the time you release this, but I hope not.
Joshua Doležal: Well, let's keep playing this out. So you have a book deal with Belt Publishing, and you will enjoy that as long as it lasts. But I assume you're already working on something new and that because this was something that the publisher approached you directly about, that you still don't have an agent. The Power 5 are still closed to you without representation. So when you have another project are you taking it to Belt? Are you hoping to replicate the same model where you serialize it on Substack, attract another interview from a fellow Substacker, and then hope that someone knocks on your door after that? What’s your plan? Or do you not game it out that far?
John Pistelli: I haven't gamed it out that far. I'm not currently writing something. I have a very vague idea after disparaging genre fiction of something very vaguely science fictional. I'm not quite sure, I have a few names. I feel because I have constructed a very small, to use your earlier phrase, cult of personality I feel I probably owe it to them to serialize it first. I think my deal with Belt was not exclusive. It was more like, we'll take a look at whatever you have next. So, yeah, I don't know. I haven't gamed it out that far.
Joshua Doležal: Well, let me pose a slightly more provocative question. Do you feel that Substack is the disruptor it claims to be?
John Pistelli: Yeah, I do. Actually, what I'm about to say might irritate people. I hope that the mainstream is savvy and flexible enough to co-opt some of it because otherwise we're in a more perilous state of social, political, cultural fragmentation. But for now, I do think it is where there is outside energy, outside the mainstream institutions. Whether they will want to pick that up or not, I guess they will have to decide. There are no other platforms that work for writers right now. I mean, there's Instagram, but that's pictures. I tried Instagram for about six months. I couldn't figure out what I would do with it personally. I think X is still in a way where news is made, but I don't think it's a place where you can make a literary career anymore. So yeah, I think Substack is where it's at right now.
Joshua Doležal: Well, how do you balance that with time for new creative work? I don't spend much time thinking about how all the little fragments that I'm putting out every week will add up to anything. I recognize there's potential for that on the platform, but often for me, and I know for many others, it's one of those examples of our lives being frittered away by detail.
John Pistelli: This maybe will discredit me with those that Pierre Bourdieu would call the organs of consecration, but I write really fast. I'm not Flaubert. I'm not spending eight hours on one sentence. I've never been that. I have to get lost in the dream of what I'm writing by writing it very quickly. I do consider, and I'm perfectly ready for this to redound upon me in ironic ways, but I consider that weekly newsletter essentially a loss leader for the real work. I understand that a lot of people maybe even like that more than the real work. It’s more likely that we're all completely forgotten, but I could suffer the fate of Susan Sontag saying, look at these novels I've written, and people saying, no, we just care about these essays that you considered the work of your left hand. But I also have a lot of fun with them. I try to be amusing. I try to entertain the audience. All the experimentalism that isn't in my fiction is in those weekly newsletters. I use footnotes and graphics. I don't foresee those ever being between covers or a real book, as I was saying earlier, but you never know.
Joshua Doležal: Well, I think what you just said is perhaps the essential thing and something I always have a hard time remembering myself as an artist, which is to have fun, to embrace play, to embrace the privilege of creating. Not to take it too seriously, not to feel like a modernist for whom all the structures of meaning have collapsed or Hemingway's Frederick Henry going home in the rain from the hospital. I mean, I've felt that way at times leaving academe and then thinking about how the publishing industry has basically all the same corporate flaws and influences as higher ed does. But I wonder if your answer is perhaps the best one: that if there's fun in it, if there's play, then it's worthwhile.
John Pistelli: I think so. I hope it becomes as remunerative as a job, but I hope it never becomes just a job. I hope it always has that playful spirit in it.
Today’s interview is free, but I hope you’ll take advantage of the Fall Special to claim 40% off for annual and gift subscriptions.
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