Susan Orlean: My Kind of Place

I can't remember where I first read that “The” Susan Orlean had come out with a new collection of her travel stories that were originally in The New Yorker, Outside Magazine, Travel & Leisure, Conde Nast Traveler. I bought it as soon as I could. I was at Harry Schwartz in Milwaukee and Dan went into the back room and got it out for me before they even had it on the shelves!

My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman’s Who’s Been Everywhere

I’m sorry I didn’t tell you in time for you to make last week’s events if you’re in SF, Portland, or Seattle, but I just saw them now when I went to look it up. However, she’s got lots more across the country. So, do go see the woman that the Washington Post is calling “a national treasure” if you’re nearby.

Susan’s appearances.

Yes, she’s quite accomplished. But wait… when I read her intro it felt like she was one of us:

“I love the jolt you get form travel. I love the freshness and surprise of being in a new place, the way it makes even the most ordinary things seem extraordinary and strange. It makes me feel extra-alive. The things that are routine in a familiar place are thrilling somewhere new; things I don’t notice at home jump out at me when I’m traveling. As soon as I get out of town, I love stopping for gas so I can poke around the gas station minimarket besides the usual, ubiquitous junk food and cigarettes, there are always odds and ends that reveal the character of the place. Those serendipitous discoveries are my addiction. I found a real raccoon-skin Davy Crockett hat for sale in a gas station in Tennessee; a hand-painted pamphlet—the biography of a famous local giant—among the mass-market magazines in a convenience store in Florida; homemade barbecue beside the Doritos and Slim Jims in a minmart in Missouri. These are little tokens of what make all journeys seem so promising, so loaded with possibility—full of the yet unseen, the impossible to imagine, the still unknown.

I love her website. How cool is it that someone that big does her own personal website? It even has her contact email on it. Do you think it gets through?

Here’s another part from the introduction that I really liked:

“TO BE HONEST, I view all stories as journeys. Journeys are the essential text of the human experience—the journey from birth to death, from innoncence to wisdom, from ignorance to knowledge, from where we start to where we end. There is almost no piece of important writing—the Bible, the Odyssey, Chaucer, Ulysses—that isn’t explicitly or implicitly the story of a journey. Even when I don’t actually go anywhere for a particular story, the way I report is to immerse myself in something I usually know very little about, and what I experience is the journey toward a grasp of what I’ve seen. I picture my readers having the same expedition, in an armchair, as they begin reading one of my pieces and work their way through it, ending up with the distinct feeling of having been somewhere else, whether it’s somewhere physically exotic or just the “somewhere else: of being inside someone else’s life.”

Here are some interviews with Susan Orlean:
Powells (2001)
Radio interviews and other interviews connected with Adaptation
Susan Orlean with Robert Birnbaum (2001)
On Fresh Air with Terry Gross (June 26, 2003)
Susan Orlean with Producer Edward Saxton
Interview on Book Page (2001)
Salon.com (2001)

More interviews as listed on her website

Now to read Her Kind of Place….