Orlean, Susan

              The Omnibus Lecture Series
Susan Orlean: “My Encounters with Extraordinary People”

[Vicky Carwein]: Good evening and welcome to the final lecture of the 2012-2013 Omnibus season. I’m Vicky Carwein, chancellor here at IPFW, and it is truly my pleasure to welcome you all this evening and to welcome our distinguished speaker this evening, best-selling author Susan Orlean. She writes with warmth and humor about a broad range of topics, and I know we’re going to enjoy her lecture “My Encounters with Extraordinary People.” As I said, this is the last lecture of this year’s season and in four weeks IPFW will be celebrating yet another graduation, and we will be graduating over fifteen hundred students. And so we have had another very busy academic year and are going to add many more students to our fifty thousand alumni that have graduated from IPFW over these past many years, the majority of whom still live and work here in Northeast Indiana. So we continue to serve our region in a very distinguished way. For any of graduates, families, husbands, wives, children, friends, family members, congratulations to you, and we look forward to seeing you in four weeks. Let me just remind you that in an effort to be more environmentally friendly and cost-effective, we will no longer send postcards through the U.S. Mail for our next Omnibus season, which will begin in September. But we would like to keep you electronically apprised of next season’s speakers if you will share with us your email address. So in the program this evening there is an insert that you can complete, and if you can just hand it to an usher when you leave we’ll be sure that you’ll receive notices as we plan for next fall. As always, I want to express our deepest appreciation to the sponsors of our Omnibus Lecture Series. Through the generosity of the founding Omnibus sponsor, the English Bonter Mitchell Foundation, all lectures have been offered free of charge since 1995 and have provided a tremendous value to our campus and our community. With their loyal support, IPFW has been able to host more than one hundred nationally recognized speakers. We appreciate as well the 2012-2013 Omnibus media sponsors, Wane TV and Northeast Indiana Public Radio, who have supported the series for many years, helping us to publicize these outstanding lectures. And now just a reminder for the format for this evening. Immediately after the lecture there will be a question and answer period. There is one microphone stand on the lower level and there’s one on the second level where you can line up, if you will, to ask your question rather than shout it from your seat. Please try to phrase your questions succinctly to allow time for as many audience members as possible who wish to ask questions. Several of Ms. Orlean’s books are for sale in the lobby tonight, and she will be available after the lecture for book signing. And now it is my distinct pleasure to introduce the introducer of our distinguished speaker, Dr. Debrah Huffman. Dr. Huffman is associate director of our writing center in the department of English and Linguistics. Her academic specializations are in the teaching of rhetoric, reading and writing, and the preparation of teachers in those areas. Just this week Debrah received notice that she will be promoted to associate professor and tenured beginning this summer. So please welcome Dr. Debrah Huffman. [Applause]

[Dr. Debrah Huffman]: Good evening. Nine books, over thirty articles, and dozens upon dozens speaking engagements ago, Susan Orlean was a student at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She was studying literature and history and writing poetry. That she would become a best-selling author makes me think about the nearly three hundred majors and forty-five graduate majors we have here at IPFW in the Department of English and Linguistics. I wonder which of them have the drive to become a writer like Susan did when she was very young. I wonder what our students will take away from their education that will help fuel the drive, like Susan took what poetry taught her about efficiency of description. What creative impulses move in the classrooms of the nearly thirty faculty that work in our department that teach majors. Susan Orlean created her own style of literary non-fiction, literally from the ordinary. Here writing is a magnifying lens, letting us see things like origami, small towns, orchids, and dogs as the fascinating things they are and inspire. In doing so she shows us what is profound and what appears to be simple; what is “extra” about ordinary. As she states in one of her books, “an ordinary life examined closely reveals itself to be exquisite and complicated and exceptional, somehow managing to be both heroic and plain.” Please welcome author, journalist, teacher, and extraordinary writer, Susan Orlean.

[Susan Orlean]: Thank you Chancellor Carwein, thank you Debrah, and thank you all of your brave enough to come out tonight. I know it’s a nasty, nasty night so this is very heartening to see those brave among you. As you’ve heard, I’m both an Ohioan by birth and a Michigander by education, and so being in Indiana feels very familiar to me, including this weather (laughter). I have to say just as an aside, I’m living in Los Angeles right now and I have to tell you, you get ruined, ruined completely, very quickly. So I think I need to spend a little more time back in the Midwest to remember that you can tough it out; it builds character. And I will say this is just about the warmest welcome I’ve had in my many travels. So everything that people say about how warm people in Indiana are, I would say is absolutely true. So I want to say a very special thanks to everyone involved with the Omnibus Lecture Series for bringing me here. I was just reading the lineup of the people who have been here before me, and it’s a pretty extraordinary group of people. I feel very honored to be among them. And I especially want to thank Louis Tieg for taking care of me today and Cheryl Truesdell for hosting me around earlier this evening and making me feel very welcome. You know I’ve always wanted to be a writer. In fact as far as I can recall I never wanted to be anything other than a writer. I wasn’t one of those girls who wanted to be a ballerina or a nurse, I always wanted to be a writer. In junior high school I took a career guidance test that suggested once the test was analyzed that I would do well as either an army officer or a forest ranger (laughter). So I still see a career path out there for me. You know, after that, I thought about this for years, trying to figure out, how did I come up with that? And the only thing I can think of is I must have said I didn’t want to work in an office. I did not pursue either of those careers. I decided that I would try to do this crazy thing of being a writer. The only problem is, I didn’t know how you went about becoming a writer. I didn’t want to be a newspaper reporter because I’ve never cared about knowing things first, and I think that’s essential if you’re going to be a newspaper reporter. I never wanted to write about things that were considered important or newsworthy; I didn’t want that to be a requirement of what I wrote about. I wanted to write things about things and people that intrigued me, and to write about them in a way that would surprise readers and maybe make them understand why these things intrigued me as much as they did. I especially liked to do this sort of sneaky thing, which was to make people interested in something that they were absolutely sure they couldn’t be interested in. In fact, I had a conversation a little earlier this evening about my book that came out last year about Rin Tin-Tin, the German Shepard actor dog. And the person who I was speaking to said, “You know, I loved your book, but I’m a cat person.” And I said, and I meant this very genuinely, that I consider that the greatest compliment. Because what could be more wonderful, as a mission in whatever line of work you’re in, then to introduce people to something they didn’t know they could care about. Or something they didn’t know they could find interesting, and have them walk away from it saying, “I never knew, who knew?” And that is to me the greatest pleasure. When I wrote “The Orchid Thief”, you know, I knew I had the orchid people in my back pocket, that I didn’t worry about. What I loved are the people who came up to me and said, “I can’t believe I just read a whole book about orchids.” And I said, “Well, I can’t believe I just wrote a whole book about orchids.” The fact is that those are the things that I’m interested in and that accomplishment of bringing people to something new is my greatest satisfaction as a writer. Even when I first began considering the idea of becoming a writer, it seemed to me there were at least two important decisions a writer had to make. I had to decide whether I wanted to write stories that I knew people wanted to hear, or whether I’d be more of a teacher, taking them to stories that they didn’t even know they wanted to learn. And that decision is a constant in the life of a writer, and it’s really fundamental to what I do and why I do it. I discovered very early, after a few rather tragic efforts at covering beats like county government, that everyone should do at least once in their life, that what I really enjoyed was illuminating the nooks and crannies of experience, and to surprise people by what I found. I wanted to be that tour guide, taking readers to places and introducing them to people they wouldn’t otherwise get to know. Now, the title of my talk, “My Encounters with Extraordinary People,” is a little bit of a bait and switch I have to admit. Because in fact the subjects I’m really drawn to are not conventionally extraordinary. In fact, in many cases I would say that they are completely ordinary. But I knew that I could find something extraordinary in their ordinariness. I really believe and I continue to believe that anything at all is worth writing about if you care about it enough. And that the best and only necessary justification for writing any particular story is that I cared about it. Easier said than done of course, and the challenge is to write those stories about ordinary life in a way that makes people see what about them elevates them from being an ordinary story into something exceptional. The best stories to me actually are almost like folk melodies. They’re so natural like a folk melody that you can’t believe that it had never been written before or that it ever was written, that it simply didn’t exist. And that feeling that a story was right there in front of you and you simply never noticed it is the real pleasure of finding a story that has that feel for me. I believe in the very simple fact that there is poetry in the facts of ordinary life. Now I’m a very stubborn person, and there’ve been times when my stubbornness looked like it was going to lead me into disaster, both personally but more particularly professionally. I will spare you the details of the personal stubbornness that backfired, and instead focus on my stubbornness professionally. But you know that stubbornness most of the time has turned out to be rather fortunate. So I want to tell you a little bit about one particular instance of this. Some years ago I was called by “Esquire” magazine, and this was a huge thing for me; I’d never written for “Esquire”. And of course it’s an incredible magazine, and it’s extremely exciting for them to call me and ask me to write a piece for them. They had an assignment in mind. They wanted me to profile the actor Macaulay Culkin, who was ten years old at the time. Gives you an idea of how long ago this took place. I think he has children now. The editor who called me said it was going to be used in an issue, the story was going to have a headline “The American Man: Age Ten.” And they wanted me to write the profile on Macaulay Culkin. So there is not a writer in the world I think who wouldn’t be thrilled by an offer from “Esquire” magazine, and I was thrilled, but I was also very stubborn. And I would also like to suggest that I was very fool-hardy, and even now I cannot believe that I did this. But I said to the editor, “Well, I’m really excited, love to write for you of course, and I would certainly like to write a piece with the headline ‘The American Man: Age Ten,’ but how if we write it about just some ordinary kid who is ten years old and not Macaulay Culkin. Because really how many kids are there like Macaulay Culkin, not that many ten-year-olds have a manager.” And I just said, you know, let’s just do it about a real ten-year-old American kid. Now, I have to say, I’m a little shocked even now that my editor said, “Alright, sure,” and he did. And my first thought was I don’t know any ten-year-old boys; I don’t know where to find them. I could probably go to a mall, but then isn’t that illegal to just? I didn’t know what to do, but I also thought, this is my big chance to write for “Esquire” magazine, what am I doing? It would be so much easier to write about Macaulay Culkin. The other part of me was saying, no this is the better story, this is a better story. So I started calling a lot of my friends, I was single at the time, and I remember calling friends and saying, “Do you know any ten-year-old boys?” And there’s like this long silence. Yeah, then I would explain myself, and eventually a friend of a friend introduced me to a family living in a suburb in New Jersey who had a ten-year-old boy. And I explained to his parents what I had in mind, and they agreed. They said, “Well sure, if Colin’s willing, it’s up to you.” And really it was amazing that they agreed because I said, you know, I’m just trying to write about what it’s like to be a ten-year-old boy. There’s no agenda, there’s no news story, we’re so used to stories now being about something dramatic, or some tragedy. This was just what’s it like to be ten. And so he agreed, although, in typical ten-year-old boy fashion, kind of went [shrugs shoulders]. And I should say, just to give you a little sort of sidebar here, I was very excited about this story and my editor at Esquire said to me “Look, I don’t want to pressure you, but it’s the cover story, we need it in three weeks. And the entire rest of the magazine has already been sent to the printer, but don’t feel pressure.” Well, I trucked out to Glen Ridge, New Jersey, Monday morning, early because I was going to go to school with this boy. I showed up and he looked at me, and I think for the first time he looked at me and thought, “You’re going to come to school with me?” And I looked at him and thought, “I have three weeks for my career to either launch or collapse, don’t mess with me.” And you know, now that I have, I have an eight-year-old, and I can tell you the idea. You know I said, “Colin, you know, you agreed that I could come to school with you.” He shunned me. You don’t know what shunning is until you are shunned by a ten-year-old boy. We walk to school; I had to walk behind him. I think he was so embarrassed, and I showed up in class, and you know I’m not a very tall person; I felt huge like I’m this giant woman in this room of fifth graders. And his teacher had set a chair out for me and I had to squeeze into this little desk chair. And Colin didn’t talk to me, and all day long I kept thinking, “What was so wrong with Macaulay Culkin?” That would have been easy. And I followed him home, despairing; the next day showed up, followed him to school, again shunned; I was starting to get desperate. And that is the thing about doing these stories that are kind of in the ether; there is no program, there is no set of interview questions; it’s about immersing yourself in someone’s world and trying to learn something about it. And I will say the thing I did learn is that if you’re ten-years-old, you don’t really want a grown woman hanging out with you. Then suddenly a lightbulb went off in Colin’s head, and he realized I had a car. It was smooth from that point on; we were best of friends. I had a car, and I had a per diem. We bonded. You don’t know how many video games you can play on a per diem--a lot. After my two weeks with Colin, I, first of all I just completely bonded with him; it was really an incredible experience, and I have to say it rewarded me for that crazy stubbornness because I’ve written about many celebrities, some of whom have been very nice, very interesting, but you’re never going to hang out and play video games for hours with Tom Hanks; it’s not going to happen. This was a, you know, a really different way to get to know someone’s life. And you might say, well who cares, but in fact it was really rather extraordinary to feel that I was inhabiting this little boy’s life not as a teacher, not as a parent, but to try to see what it felt like inside his head. And it was a crazy, the inside of his head was a fascinating place. As his father said to me, “Living with Colin is a little like living with a Martian who’s done some reading on American culture.” I just want to read a little bit to you from the beginning of that piece. “If Colin Duffy and I were to get married, we would have matching superhero notebooks. We would wear shorts, big sneakers, and long baggy t-shirts depicting famous athletes every single day, even in the winter. We would sleep in our clothes, we would both be good at Nintendo, but Colin would be better than me. We would have some homework, but it would never be too hard, and we would’ve always just finished it. We would eat pizza and candy for all of our meals. We wouldn’t have sex, but we would have crushes on each other, and magically babies would appear in our home. We would win the lottery and then buy land in Wyoming, where we would have one of every kind of cute animal. All the while Colin would be working in law enforcement, probably the FBI. Our favorite movie star, Morgan Freeman, would visit us occasionally. We would listen to the same arrhythmic song over and over and over again, and watch two hours of television every Friday night. We would both be good at football, have best friends, and know how to drive. We would cure AIDS and the garbage problem, and everything that hurts animals. We would hang out a lot with Colin’s dad. For fun we would load a sling shot with dog food and shoot it at my butt. We would have a very good life.” Thank you. You know, it’s not war reporting, but it does require a certain fortitude. I’d actually, we’ll see how our time is going, but it’s a piece that I really enjoy reading and to me it’s as if it happened yesterday. And amazingly enough, Colin Duffy is now thirty years old. So it’s quite amazing to look back and think of that moment of time, which to me is a permanent one. Sometimes the range of subjects I’ve written about looks a little like an all you can eat buffet. I’ve written about orchid collectors, Rin Tin-Tin devotees, taxidermists, fashionistas, surf girls, origami masters, Manhattan real-estate brokers, a children’s clown, and an African king who was a cab driver in the Bronx. A woman with twenty-seven pet tigers, much to the dismay of her neighbors, Gospel singers, a female bullfighter, and kids cruising Main Street in Elkhart, Indiana. That was a story I wrote about for my very first book in what is called, “Saturday Night.” It was the first chapter in that book. So I’ve put in some very sentimental times here in Indiana. I recently profiled an artist who does nothing but paint portraits of people shopping in Walmart. The world is filled with interesting people. I once profiled the student council president of one of the worst high schools in New York City. Among the many things I learned in doing that piece was that being a student council president is the same everywhere. Whether you’re in a school with metal detectors and graffiti on the walls and gun incidents, or a suburban school with beautiful playing fields and computer labs. As this young woman told me, and it could have been a student council president anywhere, no one comes to meetings on time, no one remembers to bring snacks, and it’s really hard to come up with a theme for the prom. To me these stories are all connected, they’re about people mastering something or defining themselves by something that they feel they have mastered. One thing that I’ve really come to believe about people is that we all want to be good at something and recognized for it. We don’t always understand someone else’s sphere of mastery, excuse me. I’ll never forget when I went to the world taxidermy championships in Springfield, Illinois. Oh were some of you there too? I just have to tell you as an aside, I had had this, you know, this is the way my mind works for better or worse. I was visiting a friend who’s a painter and he does a lot of paintings of animals, and in order to do good life studies he bought taxidermy molds. And he had a catalog from a taxidermy supply company sitting on his coffee table, it was about this big. I thought there was like one taxidermist in the entire United States, and here was this catalog this thick of taxidermy supplies. And I just thought, this is amazing; who knew it’s a growth industry? And I ran home and I googled, you know, taxidermy and there were like eleven billion hits. And one of the first things that came up was that the world taxidermy championships were coming up in like two weeks. And I mean I could hardly sleep, I was so excited. And the next day I tore down to my office at the “New Yorker” and raced into the editor-in-chief’s office, and I said, “Can I go to the world taxidermy championships?” And he said, “Let me think if I’ve already assigned that to somebody.” That was actually one of the most, it was just so much fun to go. I mean you haven’t lived until you are waiting for an elevator in a Holiday Inn in Springfield, Illinois, and the elevator door opens and there’s a guy holding a moose head. When I was there overhearing people debating how big the wrinkles in a wild boar’s snout ought to be, or listening to someone else, you know, debating how to place the whiskers on an otter. That’s when it hit me. I don’t have a strong opinion about the wrinkles on a wild boar’s snout, but I’m proud to say that I can understand the impulse to do something well and to be acknowledged for it. Even if it’s something that I personally will never do. It’s the passion behind it that I’m curious about, and the passion that everybody has about something, whether it’s to build something, to raise your children well, to play a sport well, to earn a lot of money, to have a hobby that they do well. That’s a basic impulse in human nature, and we can recognize it in other people even if we don’t share it. The stories that resonate the most, I believe, and the ones that surprise us are ones that remind us of our capacity to understand passion in other people. So I would like to read just a few short sections from some of the pieces I’ve written and talk a little bit. And this was something that I was thinking about recently because this is one of the stories that I wrote that was actually made into a movie called “Blue Crush.” And I haven’t read the story in a very long time so I just wanted to read to you a short section from it. It was called “The Maui Surf Girls,” and I, you already know I’ve had dog food sling-shotted into my rear end. There are times when my work does bring me low, and one of the other times was writing about these young women in Maui who surfed all day long. They were homeschooled, they were champion surfers, all they did was surf and surf and surf, and they were incredibly talented surfers. And of course they were all gorgeous and they were just in ridiculously good shape and they just walked around all day in bikinis. And they kept saying to me “So you’re going to try surfing, right?” And I thought, I’m not even going to get in a bathing suit, no. And they kept tormenting me. This was one time where I had to stand my ground, and I said, I’m allergic to water, I can’t. So I’d just like to read a short section from the beginning of this piece. “The Maui Surfer girls love one another’s hair. It is awesome hair, long and bleached by the sun, and it falls over their shoulders straight like water or in squiggles like seaweed or in waves. They are forever playing with it, yanking it up into ponytails or twisting handfuls and securing them with chopsticks or pencils, or dividing it as carefully as you would a pile of coins, and then weaving it into tight yellow plates. Not long ago I was on a beach in Maui watching the surfer girls surf, and when they came out of the water they sat in a row facing the ocean. And each girl took the hair of the girl in front of her and combed it with her fingers and crisscrossed it into braids. The Maui surfer girls even love the kind of hair that I dreaded when I was their age, fourteen or so. They love wild, knotty, bright hair as big and stiff as carpet. The most unstraight, unsleak, unordinary hair you could imagine. And they love it, I suppose, because when you’re young and on top of the world you can love anything you want, and just the fact that you love it makes it cool and fabulous.” My talk today is about meeting extraordinary people, but I also want to mention that some of my favorite subjects have not been people. I’ve profiled my share of animals too. In fact, one of my favorite subjects ever was a show dog, a boxer, and I really became quite enchanted by him. And I had my comeuppance when I was working on this piece because, as I’ve said, I’ve written a lot about celebrities as well and I usually make this condition, which is. You know, with celebrities they almost always like to have their manager or their agent sitting in the room when you do the interview, and I just say, “Look, I need some time, just us. You know I can understand, you want to manage, make sure they’re not saying something embarrassing that I’m going to put in the piece, but I really need some time alone.” So when I first talked to Biff’s owners I was, you know, very fists up. I said “Look, I know he’s a show dog, I know you have his handler and the owner and the vet, but I need time alone with him.” And they were looking at me like what are you talking about. And I said “You know, look, I just need my time with him. Alone.” And they finally agreed, they said, “Well alright. Well, actually, in about a half hour he’s going to be down in the gym on the treadmill, so you could have your time then.” This is like a surreal moment, right?  I’m arguing to have my private time with a dog who’s on a treadmill. And I went downstairs, and he was on the treadmill; you know you have to watch your weight if you’re a show dog. And his owner said, “You know, I’ll check on you in a half hour,” and she left. And I sat there, and I suddenly thought, “Dogs can’t talk.” So I would like to read just a little section from - I guess it would be a little like profiling Harpo Marx - “Show Dog.” “If I were a bitch, I'd be in love with Biff Truesdale. Biff is perfect. He's friendly, good-looking, rich, famous, and in excellent physical condition. He almost never drools. He's not afraid of commitment. He wants children -- actually, he already has children and wants a lot more. He works hard and is a consummate professional, but he also knows how to have fun. What Biff likes most is food and sex. This makes him sound boorish, which he is not--he's just elemental. Food he likes even better than sex. His favorite things to eat are cookies, mints, and hotel soap, but he will eat just about anything. Richard Krieger, a friend of Biff's who occasionally drives him to appointments, said not long ago, ‘When we're driving on I-95, we'll usually pull over at McDonald's. Even if Biff is napping, he always wakes up when we're getting close. I get him a few plain hamburgers with buns -- no ketchup, no mustard, and no pickles. He loves hamburgers. I don't get him his own French fries, but if I get fries myself, I always flip a few for him into the back.’ If you're ever around Biff while you're eating something he wants to taste -- say cold roast beef, a Wheatables cracker, chocolate, pasta, aspirin, whatever -- he will stare at you across the pleated bridge of his nose and let his eyes sag and his lips tremble and allow a little bead of drool to percolate at the edge of his mouth until you feel so crummy that you give him some. This routine puts the people who know him in a quandary, because Biff has to watch his weight. Usually, he is as skinny as Kate Moss, but he can put on three pounds in an instant. The holidays can be tough. He takes time off at Christmas and spends it at home, in Attleboro, Massachusetts, where there's a lot of food around, and no pressure and no schedule, and it's easy to eat all day. The extra weight goes to his neck. Luckily, Biff likes working out. He runs for fifteen or twenty minutes twice a day, either outside or on his Jog-Master. When he's feeling heavy, he runs longer, and skips snacks, until he's back down to his ideal weight of seventy-five pounds.” I’ll just finish this little section. “Biff is a boxer. He is a show dog--he performs under the name Champion Hi-Tech's Arbitrage. So looking good is not mere vanity; it's business. A show dog's career is short, and judges are unforgiving. Each breed is judged by an explicit standard for appearance and temperament, and then there's the incalculable element of charisma. When a show dog is fat or lazy or sullen, he doesn't win; when he doesn't win, he doesn't enjoy ancillary benefits of being a winner, like appearing as the celebrity spokesmodel on packages of Pedigree Mealtime with Lamb and Rice, which Biff will be doing soon, or picking the best-looking bitches and charging them six hundred dollars or so for his sexual favors, which Biff does three or four times a month. Another ancillary benefit of being a winner is that almost every single weekend of the year, as he travels to shows around the country, he gets to hear people applaud for him and yell his name and tell him what a good boy he is, which is something he seems to enjoy at least as much as eating a bar of soap.” Thank you. You know, the world has speeded up; it’s Wi-Fied, it’s aggregated, it’s curated, it’s digitized. But the business of words hasn’t changed. What matters is the simple idea of narratives, the stories of who we are, who we were, who we might be, how we connect to each other. We have always been and I believe we will always be hungry for narratives; we thrive on narratives. I would even say that in the history of civilization, we’ve never been more engaged in narrative. The basic unit of the human experience is the story, and I take a lot of comfort in that. You know Facebook wouldn’t have 900 million users and Twitter another 300 million if we didn’t want to hear stories, even if these stories sometimes seem very slight. The fact is, each one is a thread in the growing fabric of stories that surround us and define us and tell us who we are. People often ask if I stay in touch with the people I write about. It’s an understandable question; after all, I spend a lot of time with the people I write about and I grow to feel very close to them. And sometimes I know them better than I even know my own friends, but writing is a process. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and usually when it’s ended the writer and subject have very little in common except for the fact that there was this time that they spent together. I do love hearing what has happened to the people that I’ve written about, and I always like to know if there’s a way I can find out. Inevitably though, I do lose track of most of them, and it’s a part of this job that can make me very melancholy. I know it’s unrealistic to think that I could stay close to everyone I’ve written about, and even if I could we would never have the relationship that we have during that time when I’m writing about them, and I’m listening to everything they say. So what I have of them and always will have is just that moment that we spent together, now preserved on paper, bound between covers, cast out into the world. And they will never get any older, their faces will never fade, their dreams will still be within reach, and I will forever be with them listening as hard as I can. Thank you. Thank you. I wanted to be sure to leave time for questions, although it’s such a pleasure to be here. And you know if you’ll indulge me for one more moment, I’m just going to read one more short, short piece here because this is about a native son of Indiana. So if you’ll just give me one more minute. This was a piece that I wrote about somebody who I thought was an extraordinary person. His name was Bill Blass and he was a very, very important and successful designer, and he grew up in Indiana. Though you would never have imagined it because he embodied the sort of New York life. But I just would love to read, it just made me think about him so I’ll just read this short section to you and then we’ll take questions. So the piece was called King of the Road. “What amazes Bill Blass is amazing. Last year he was in La Jolla, California, and someone took him to a supermarket, which is somewhere he had never been before in his life. He found the supermarket, and especially the do-it-yourself ice cream sundae bar, amazing. In Nashville where I joined him recently for a trunk show, an in store event where the designer’s collection is on display, he caught me admiring a blazer made by the designer Richard Tyler that cost two thousand dollars. Even though some of the ensembles in the Blass collection cost more than six thousand dollars, he found the price of this Tyler blazer amazing. He is someone that seems fascinated by something or other much of the time. He’s a virtuoso of the high-pitched eyebrow and the fortissimo gasp. These give him a puckish air, without which he might seem irritatingly regal. Blass is classically good-looking in the manner of country gentleman, with a wide forehead, a boxy jaw, direct gaze, and a chest like a kettle drum. Almost anytime you see him, there will be a cigarette in the corner of his mouth bouncing like a little diving board. He usually stands with his hands poked into his pockets, and his jacket hitched up around them. No matter where he is, he looks as though he might be standing on the deck of a big sail boat. He’s now seventy-one years old, fond of candy, and settling into leonine stateliness. As a young man he was long-necked, blade thin, and so wolfishly handsome you could weep. I love to hear him talk; his voice is rich, gravely, and carefully inflected like a film narrator. He also has a wonderfully intimate and conspiratorial sounding whisper. At times he can sound like an American schooled in Britain, but in fact he is a depression era kid from Fort Wayne, Indiana, who came to New York at seventeen and has never left. Like all elegant people, he curses with charming abandon and to great effect. Like most successful wealthy people, he knows how to deploy a sort of captivating brattiness, to which other people quickly yield. One of the funniest things in the world is to sit in his office at his show room and listen to him bellow questions to his staff without moving a muscle or even an eyeball in their direction. At a good trunk show he does a lot of business. Two weeks ago at a trunk show at Sax, he sold over half a million dollars worth of dresses, and that is the most any American designer showing at Sax has ever sold. He does bigger business though just selling his name in his designer’s eye. He licenses fifty-six products. For sixteen years, Ford manufactured a Bill Blass Lincoln Continental. Blass chose the interiors, paint colors, and trim. Blass’ trunk show philosophy is “You don’t want to be on the road so much that the novelty wears off, but you want to get to know your customer and move close. If you’re buying a Bill Blass dress for a couple thousand dollars, I’d say it’s an added attraction to have me there saying ‘Babe, that looks great on you,’ or ‘Babe, that’s just awful.’” Thank you so much, this has been such a pleasure and I’m very eager to take your questions. Don’t be shy, and I think there is protocol for the questions, right? To line up at the mic?

[Questioner]: I know you said that you don’t keep up with everyone that you write about, but whatever happened to Colin?
[Susan Orlean]: You know I would hear from his mother occasionally, and actually I’ve been recently asked to do a follow up since it’s been twenty years and somebody thought it would make a very interesting story to see what’s happened to him. So I got in touch with his mother and what was really amazing is he did go, as he fantasized when he was ten, he dreamed of going to the University of Wyoming, which he did. And he’s kind of bounced around. For awhile he was a professional gambler, and he moved to Italy for a year and came back, he’s kind of done a lot of different stuff. He’s now actually living with his parents, which is, you know, for my purposes kind of perfect because I already know how to get to his house. Yes?
[Questioner]: Thank you for your remarks this evening. I sell visions of future technologies so I was struck by the parallelism of your creative process and the term illumination. And I’d like to hear how you deal with people that you know you have a good insight, it’s not just like a bad idea that you eventually realize is bad. You have this good idea but nobody else sees it.
[Susan Orlean]: That is a common issue and certainly it was for me because, you know, there’s nothing that’s quite a lead balloon like walking into an editor and saying, you know, I’m super excited about writing about, you know, a Manhattan real estate broker, or a children’s clown. Let’s use that as an example. You know in this world of, you know, the news cycle it’s like so what a children’s clown. And I was just convinced that these were good ideas, and quite simply I wouldn’t take no for an answer. And I think that is a simplistic way of expressing it, but I don’t really know how else to explain it except that I said “I’m sure, I’m sure you have to let me, you know, give me the chance. Once I’ve done it, if you still say it’s no good, but then I’ll except it but don’t shut me down on the idea alone.” And unfortunately I think that there’s so much risk aversion in the economy. You know, it’s certainly not only journalism and the publishing world that is worried about taking a chance. It’s the state of, it’s probably always been true, but it’s even more true when there are economic issues. I think it just has to be that you have so much determination and that you can show, that you have a chance to execute enough to show that it’s not some crazy thing. I just don’t think there’s a magic trick to make it work otherwise.
[Questioner]: What do you like to do for fun?
[Susan Orlean]: Oh I, you know, well I have a lot of fun doing my work I have to admit. You know, taking these adventures, but my kind of hobbies I’m a runner, I love to cook, I love to garden. I, you know, hang out with friends, that’s probably the thing that I love the most. Love going to the movies, I love to read obviously, and I’m kind of a geek. I love, you know, geeking around on gadgets and I love new technology, it’s sort of a hobby of mine. So I keep myself busy and in the summer when I’m living in New York I also have  a lot of animals; I have chickens and turkies and cattle and I play with them. Anymore questions?
[Questioner]: Okay. This evening I asked you this question, and you said to wait until after your lecture, so I’m going to ask you now. I wanted to know how you write so many quirky stories. How do you go about getting those ideas, and where do they come from?
[Susan Orlean]: You know, I was asked today in the class that I met with what, what a young writer could do to make themselves marketable. And I think the number one thing is to learn how to develop story ideas. And some of it is just looking everywhere, looking in the most unlikely places. My book “The Orchid Thief” came out of an accidental situation where I was sitting on an airplane and had run out of things to read, someone had left a Miami Herald in the seat pocket, normally I would not urge you to go into a seat pocket ‘cause they’re disgusting, but, and when I read a newspaper like that, I look for the weird little articles that are sort of tucked in the back. The ones that are generated locally, not the AP stories, and saw the story about a guy arrested with orchids. And it just stuck, but you know I feel like everywhere you turn, a conversation with someone, a flyer stuck on a telephone pole, you know, as much as I don’t really like talking to the people sitting next to me on airplanes in case they keep talking. You know, it happens that you’ll be chatting and someone will mention something about what they do and it clicks. So I feel like I’m always, it’s a habit of mine to always be looking, always waiting for that click of thinking ‘oh that would be interesting, that would be interesting.’ So often people have great stories and they don’t even know it, and they’ll mention it just in passing and you have to develop the instinct to think ‘wait, wait, wait, backup. What was that?’ I think as a matter of course, you know, writers have to read as many publications as they can and, you know, kind of noodle around on the internet looking for stuff and in particular looking at the things that normally are not your field of interest. And I often will tell students if you have a point where you just cannot think of a story idea, go get the newspaper and just make yourself for a week read the section that you never read, that you know nothing about. If you’re a guy who always reads the sports section, so read the style section and something will strike you. But it’s really your, your stock and trade as a writer to have those good ideas. Editors aren’t in a position to find those good stories and they really count on you to do that. I think there’s, oh, there’s another. Gentleman?
[Questioner]: Assume that your mission is to write about the three most important women in America. And you’re, I want to know who you think they’d be and how you’d begin the journey by asking what question you would ask each of them to write about them as you begin that journey. So I’d like to know who would be those three women that you’d really like to write about because they’ve made a difference in America and what question you would ask them to begin your journey
[Susan Orlean]: And these are three present day?
[Questioner Continued]: Oh absolutely.
[Susan Orlean]: Oh.
[Questioner Continued]: Because they would be here.
[Susan Orlean]: Okay, can I be one of them?
[Questioner Continued]: Based upon what I’ve heard tonight I think you win.
[Susan Orlean]: Alright. You’d have to give me a little time to think about who the three are, but you know I think that the question that I would begin with, and I’m just saying this completely off the top of my head, is “tell me about yourself,” and leave it. Who those three would be I mean it’s a good question and I’m not sure, I would really need to think about that because I’m not, you know they’re the obvious ones, you know it’s sort of a joke. In fact it’s a joke in the movie Adaptation, you know, who are the three people you’d have dinner with and everybody says, you know, Einstein, Jesus, and I forget who the third one, everybody says it and you think “Really? Is that really truly who you’d have dinner with?” So if you say, you know, the kind of off the top of my head you’d say “Oh well, Michelle Obama” and I mean, you know, they’re obvious and I think rather than throwing that answer out to you I’d want to say, you know, I’d try really hard to think of three people who are important in a way that’s maybe not that obvious and that would be more revealing. I mean I understand that powerful, well known people have an important part in our culture, but I do feel that there’s more insight that comes going at a different level and meeting the people who don’t have as much of a, of a, a kind of architecture around them that’s going to make it hard to ever really know who they are. Thank you. Have I gotten all your questions? Okay, well I just cannot thank you enough, I’m going to be out in front signing books and again thank you for coming, for braving the tough weather, and for sharing this evening with me.