Bestselling author Susan Orlean will join Dean Nelson and author Nick Hornby in a conversation about Writing That Inspires as part of the 29th Annual Writer鈥檚 Symposium by the Sea.
Susan Orlean has been called 鈥渁 national treasure鈥� by the Washington Post and 鈥渁 latter-day Tocqueville鈥� by the New York Times. She is the author of The Library Book, Rin Tin Tin, Saturday Night, and The Orchid Thief, which was made into the Academy Award-winning film Adaptation. Her most recent book is , a collection of 15 essays that 鈥渃elebrate the meaningful cross-species connections that grace our collective existence.鈥�
Along with her novels, Orlean has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1992. Her deeply moving explorations of American stories both familiar and obscure have earned her a reputation as one of America鈥檚 most distinctive journalistic voices. According to Dean Nelson, director of the Writer鈥檚 Symposium, Orlean鈥檚 pieces 鈥渕ake you care about things you never knew you cared about.鈥� She has covered topics ranging from treadmill desks to taxidermy and has also written extensively about animals: show dogs, racing pigeons, backyard chickens, and beyond. She currently writes the column, an obituary column that pays homage to people, places, and things we鈥檝e lost. Her journalism for The New Yorker and other publications has been compiled into two collections: The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup: My Encounters with Extraordinary People and My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who鈥檚 Been Everywhere.
For Orlean, topics that cross between ordinary and unusual are a source of challenge and motivation for her writing:
鈥淚鈥檓 interested in life and subjects that exist to be in the margins, in those places where there鈥檚 cognitive dissonance, where what you expect isn鈥檛 what you find, or what you hope for is not what you end up with, or what you imagined to be true turns out to not be entirely true. To me, that is where there鈥檚 a lot of intellectual richness, and that鈥檚 where my curiosity is really piqued.鈥� 鈥� Susan Orlean, , 2021
Orlean will join author and screenwriter Nick Hornby in a conversation on Writing That Inspires with Dean Nelson on February 23, 2024. Hornby is currently adapting Orlean鈥檚 book Rin Tin Tin into a movie. This interview will be their first time on stage together.
For more information about the 29th Annual Writer's Symposium by the Sea, visit pointloma.edu/2024writers.
This event is hosted in partnership with .
