Friday, April 25, 2025
Become a Patron!We have John Glionna (@johnglionna) here today. Spoke to him in December 2024, so, you know, we’re making good time here at CNF Pod HQ.
For the people who follow up with me from like a week ago, I’m like, ‘you might want to get a burrito and a Pepsi Zero Sugar.’ John’s a fun guy, one of those great journalists cut from a different fabric, a pre-internet vintage. He spent 26 years at the LA Times and he’s the author of No Friday Night Lights: Reservation Football on the Edge of America (Bison Books). Except there’s not really much football in the book.
This story takes place in a small, secluded town of McDermitt, Nevada, on the border of Oregon and Nevada. The high school rarely has enough kids to field a team of eight or so players. If they play, they lose and they lose big. It’s the story about a town trying to keeps its nose above water. It’s a town abandoned by the mining-industry boom times of the the late 20th century. John’s story is one of resilience and pride, of losing but not being a loser.
There’s now a weekly companion podstack at creativenonfictionpodcast.substack.com. If you want the transcripts and the text for the parting shot and deep dives into the archives, this is the newsletter to enrichen your podcast experience. It’s pretty cool, you should shotgun a few.
And while we’re hocking product, don’t forget to window shop at Patreon.com/cnfpod if you want to support the show financially. You can also follow for free and be a wallflower. The $4 and up tiers get some one-on-one time with me to talk some things through. Maybe it’s research and reporting, maybes it’s writing, maybe it’s marketing, maybe it’s that pesky voice in your head that tells you you’re not worth it and that your dream is stupid. I can speak to it because my dreams are dumb.
In this episode we talk about
- What a Glionna Story is
- How John didn’t punch down in his writing
- Working with Glenn Stout on this book
- What he loves most about this kind of work
- And solving that thorny question of whether a story needs better writing or better reporting
You can follow the show on Instagram @creativenonfictionpodcast.
