Susan Orlean's Blog, page 16

I live in one county but pay property taxes in another, and have a cell-phone number that shows up, on caller ID, with the name of a town to which I have no connection. My mailing address is in a town I don't live in. For a long time, I kept my car registered in the state where I grew up, so that's what I had on my license plates. My husband's phone has an area code from a state we moved away from three years ago. My son goes to school sixteen miles from our house, in what happens to be yet ...

This is a true story:

My first book was acquired by two people I will call Editor A and Editor B, who ran a small imprint at a big publishing house. We had a great lunch to celebrate. A few months later, Editor A left book publishing to become a newspaper writer. Editor B became my primary editor. She and I had a nice lunch to talk about my book.

A few months after that, Editor B was promoted to publisher of the larger house—let us call it Publisher W—that owned the small imprint. Because E...

I woke up thinking about Ron Hansen's majestic, mournful book "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford." The book had gotten into my head the way some songs do, repeating its rhythms and tones over and over. On a whim, I mentioned it on Twitter, added the searchable hashtag #booksthatchangedmyworld, and sat still for a moment. About three seconds later, the flood began—dozens and dozens of other people started listing books that had changed their worlds. They kept listing f...

I'm writing this from the MacDowell Colony, an artist's retreat in the woods of New England, and I am sitting in the one spot on the property with Internet access. There used to be two buildings wired here, but apparently the place was taking on the continual-partial-attention quality of a midtown Starbucks, with everyone hunched over their laptops after dinner instead of talking to each other, so the main building was unplugged, leaving WiFi just in the small library. The question of...

I met Thomas Kinkade, the Painter of Light, in 2001, and at the time it would have been nearly impossible to imagine the financial straits, including bankruptcy, that he's in today. In 2001, he was the Painter of Incredible Profits; everything he touched—limited edition prints, sculpture, mousepads, cross-stitch kits, housing developments—was sought after and striven for and bought. He was in a great mood when we met, and, even though I had been offered one hour and not a minute more of his t...

I'm writing a book that begins in 1918. Yesterday, after I typed out "WWI" for the tenth time, it started to look very … wrong. Was it the "I" looking too spindly next to the big fat "W"? Or did it just seem wrong to call a monumental, global convulsion, in which sixteen million people died, by a nickname that looked a little too much like the World Wrestling Federation logo? I skidded to a halt, staring at my computer screen, trying to figure out how to write "World War One" properly.

The...

The fence guy visited last week and gave us a price on securing the perimeter for our prospective mini-herd of Black Angus. I now have a new appreciation of the various ways you can judge wealth: not just by the size of someone's house or the make of cars in the driveway or the wheels of cheese in the cellar but by the extent and type of fence around the property. It's all about the price of gold—the roughest split-rail, the most unadorned three-strand electric, the...

People who live in the countryside discuss ag deductions with the kind of zeal and wonder that Manhattanites discuss rent-controlled apartments—that is, everyone wants one, but no one can quite figure out how to get one. An ag deduction is a discount on property tax for anyone using their land for an agricultural business. You need to gross fifty thousand dollars to qualify, so selling a bouquet harvested from your bed of petunias won't do it. So I have been casting around for a scheme. My...

I refuse to talk about the Cavaliers' loss to the Celtics in the N.B.A. playoffs. I refuse to talk about where LeBron James will next play. I refuse to talk about Cleveland's magnetic attraction to loss and pain, including, but not limited to, its sports teams. I refuse to talk about the special, inevitable protesting-too-much nature of being a Cleveland native and the defensive posture you must always assume every time anyone (everyone) chuckles over the city's burning river, its feckless p...

Now we're e-mailing and tweeting and texting so much, a phone call comes as a fresh surprise. I get text messages on my cell phone all day long, and it warbles to alert me that someone has sent me a message on Facebook or a reply or direct message on Twitter, but it rarely ever rings. My house phone is as silent as a stone, and if it ever leaps to life, it's usually an automated call reminding us that our Terminix pest-control expert will be visiting tomorrow between nine and five. I have...