It grows as you use it, so don’t worry
When I first started writing, I imagined that I was dipping my pen into a finite pool of creative ink. I thought creativity — in my case, writing — was something akin to a natural resource like petroleum: Limited, precious, unrenewable. It made me nervous. I sized up every assignment I was offered with that scarcity in mind. Was doing this story worth depleting my supply of creative juice? Would it be a net gain, considering that I would be spending a rare commodity on it?
I’m not sure where I got this notion. I suspect that it was partly…
Once you slip out of your own skin, it’s kind of wonderful
Because my son is the new kid at a new school, joining mid-year a small group of students who’ve been together since September, he and I have been talking a lot about that special circle of hell known as Feeling Excluded. There may be no human emotion more universal; no experience more exquisitely painful and awkward. So I can’t help but wonder how I ended up in a career that forces me to experience that feeling over and over again.
What does a journalist do? We poke into other worlds and linger and observe, eavesdrop, sidle up to strangers, ask…
With our son out of the house, my husband and I provide our own teenage ambience
My son, completely at wits’ end with Zoom education, left for boarding school last month, so my husband and I became, a few years ahead of schedule, empty-nesters. I had not yet given this phase of my life much thought; my son is in tenth grade, so I had assumed I had three more years of hands-on parenting. …
Extraordinary times mean extraordinary ways to be annoyed
Want to write like your favorite author? Open one of their books and start typing.
When I first started writing professionally, I copied like crazy. Not literally copied — I didn’t lift sentences or ideas — but copied in the way an apprentice woodworker might copy a master woodworker, following the curves, mimicking the cuts and joinery, lining up my work against the model. I think it was a good habit. Quite by accident, I was teaching myself to write.
There are times when imitating the work you admire can result in something that sounds stilted, faux, flimsy. But what could be better than studying the way someone really good cobbles sentences together, paces a…
How 10th grade world history almost broke me the second time around
My son, who is in the 10th grade, hates Zoom school, and he has expressed his dislike by disregarding most of his homework. As the fall semester drew to a close, he realized he had to do it or risk not passing, so he scrambled and got most of his overdue assignments in by the time winter break began. The one class he still had to complete was World History. He dragged his feet, the days rolled by, and suddenly the possibility of actually failing the class loomed large. …
Reading your own work might be cringey, but it works
I’m putting together a collection of my stories (to be published this coming fall) so I’m going through a lot of old pieces, with varying degrees of pride and discomfort. I hate reading my old pieces. I approach it the way a lot of people approach listening to themselves on tape, or looking at pictures of themselves: A combination of cringing, hopefulness, dread, curiosity, regret, and tender optimism. Sure, when I wrote this I thought it was good — but now? Does it sound mannered, twee? Are the jokes still funny? (Were they ever funny?) Why do I use so…
Time has become fluid in the pandemic. Except when there’s a Zoom meeting.
The other day I had a meeting on Zoom and one of the participants was three minutes late. The other person in the meeting and I filled those three minutes puzzling over what calamity must have occurred to cause this lateness. Was the missing person in some peril? Was he… dead? The meeting was at 11! It was already 11:02! 11:03! Should we call someone? Alert the authorities?
This is a state of anxiety specific to this moment in time. In the history of human meetings — that is, human, in-person, flesh-to-flesh meetings, in a real place, in the real…
Online shopping has worn out its charms. I long to return to the sensory delights of retail.
I miss shopping. I really do. I love shopping; I love wandering around a store, seeing the goods, evaluating the displays, marveling at the merchandise. I love acquiring things, but even more, I love the process of being in the world of stuff, high and low, useful and frivolous. I am just as happy looking at the absurdly overpriced merch in a Rodeo Drive boutique as I am in a Harbor Freight or a Dollar Store. I’m just interested in what we humans create. It’s the amateur anthropologist in me, wandering the rows at Target.
I shop like crazy when…
I’m too skeptical and stubborn to join, but still I can’t look away
One subject I’ve returned to time and time again is cults. The first one I wrote about was EST for the Boston Phoenix; then I wrote about Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh for the Village Voice. There was hardly a cult I didn’t want to learn about and try to decipher. I am glued to documentaries about NXIVM and the mini-series about the Branch Davidians and podcasts about Synanon and Scientology. I am fascinated by cults, and by extension, fascinated by my fascination with them. What draws people to surrender their identity to a controlling, self-serving entity? …
Susan Orlean
Staff writer, The New Yorker. Author of The Library Book, The Orchid Thief, and more…Head of my very own Literati.com book club (join me!)
