{"id":1345,"date":"2016-04-22T18:24:11","date_gmt":"2016-04-22T18:24:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2016\/04\/22\/10-questions-with-susan-orlean\/"},"modified":"2025-10-16T18:48:26","modified_gmt":"2025-10-16T18:48:26","slug":"10-questions-with-susan-orlean","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2016\/04\/22\/10-questions-with-susan-orlean\/","title":{"rendered":"Susan Orlean: “My method of reporting is just to be there”"},"content":{"rendered":" \n
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\n Susan Orlean is storied for her stories. Since 1992 she’s been a staff writer at The New Yorker, and her 1998 book “The Orchid Thief” was made into the movie Adaptation. She’s written seven other books and also for Esquire, Rolling Stone, Vogue and other publications.

We’ve annotated her famous essay “The American Man, \u00a0Age 10<\/a>,” explored why “Orchid Fever” is so good<\/a>, \u00a0and extolled her virtues as a storyteller multiple times.

It was a treat, then, when Orlean, a 2004 Nieman Fellow, visited Harvard to talk about her approach to reporting and writing. She was interviewed by Kim Tingley, a 2016 Nieman Fellow and contributing editor for The New York Times Magazine. What she had to say, about reporting, about writing, about interviewing, about craft, was so good that we decided to deviate from our normal five questions.

On masterful first sentences<\/h3>