uberlife Real Champions series: Hanging out with Susan Orlean
Susan Orlean became a staff writer for The New Yorker in 1992. She has also written for Vogue, Rolling Stone and Esquire. Orlean has also written several books, including “The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup: My Encounters with Extraordinary People,” (2001), “Red Sox and Blue Fish,” (1987), “Saturday Night,” (1990) and “The Orchid Thief” (1998).
SS: So Susan you’ve had a very successful career, written for various publications including the New Yorker and books, and all sorts of stuff. If you think back to when you were first starting out, or were first inspired to write and follow the path of journalism, what was it that inspired or motivated you to start up on that journey?
SO: What inspired me initially?
SS: Yes
SO: What inspired me initially was reading. The experience of reading convinced me that words could be magical and that the experience of reading could be transformative. That has never really left me. I think that some kids want to learn how to do magic tricks, for me I think learning to be a writer was that same kind of impulse, wanting to do this thing that seemed like you could make magic happen. I always loved telling stories and I loved organising my experience of life into stories. It came very naturally to me from the time I was really a very little kid.
SS: When was your first writing role or position, whether that’s professionally or volunteering and how did you start out writing?
SO: My first professional writing experience was when I had just finished college and had moved out West. I lucked into a job at a small magazine that had just started up. Unlike most first jobs which usually involve being an assistant and making coffee and really not writing, this was actually a writing job. It was pure luck that I got it. I attribute it to nothing but incredible good fortune and enthusiasm because I wanted the job really badly, and I think that was pretty clear. I worked there for a year, which was about the amount of funding that the publication had, and then I got another writing job. I didn’t really know what or how I was doing it but I just learned by doing. I was lucky that I had opportunities to learn and make my mistakes in a professional setting with good editors around who were teaching me.
SS: Along your journey can you think of any person or people you’ve hung out with along the way that inspired you and what did you learn from them?
SO: I’ve always been really lucky to have been around a lot of writers senior to me, who were very generous, very willing to help young writers getting started. In some cases it was very specifically talking about writing, in others it was giving me an opportunity or entree to editors and magazines. I’ve got a long list of people who have been incredibly generous to me. That’s how the world works in the creative fields, because you don’t go and get certified as a writer: you make it happen by doing it. That comes about through people mentoring you and giving you a hand and help pulling you up the ladder.
SS: You’ve had a fairly prolific career, in the last 12 - 24 months can you think of a time when you had your highest moment professionally and conversely when you had one of your lowest moments professionally, and then how you picked yourself up and motivated yourself to continue?
SO: Probably the high point was having my new book reviewed and featured on the cover of the New York Times book review, Sunday section, which is a once in the lifetime experience for a writer. And it was immensely exciting, gratifying and hard to express how thrilling it was. Conversely there are always low points. The last 12 months I have a new book so it’s been a real high. But anytime you get a bad review, and no matter how well reviewed a book is there are always going to be bad reviews, and I got one for my book, in the first batch of early write ups….
SS: How do you get over it? How do you handle it?
SO: You have to first of all contextualise it and figure that this is one review out of many. You’ll get 30 or 40 reviews of a book and even the most prominent one isn’t the only one and this wasn’t especially prominent. I just reminded myself that I’ve gotten a ton of great reviews and that everybody gets bad reviews and not everyone needs to like my book. So I can’t feel bad about it personally; I have to think about it objectively and consider whether it is really meaningful or not. The bottom line always is that I am proud of my book, really proud.
The criticisms, I thought, were very foolish. If someone criticises you and it feels correct that hurts because then you sort of see your failure. In the case where you feel the criticism isn’t really legitimate you just have to brush it off and say ‘Hey, it’s opinion’. There are certain people who are not going to like my work and it doesn’t matter what I do: they are not going to like it. Then there are lots of people who really like it. That’s the nature of being a writer, that’s the nature of being a human. Not everybody likes you. If you feel good about your work then after a bad review you will feel a little stung and a little hurt, but you have to step back and just think ‘I’m proud of my book’. So that’s what matters, to feel proud of the job you’ve done and then move on. I try not to dwell or read negative reviews very closely because there’s no benefit in it.
SS: What advice would you give to young people starting out in journalism or people who have got a dream to write a book?
SO: My first piece of advice is to really fall in love with the idea of being a storyteller and think about what that means and what responsibility comes with it along with the pleasure and the opportunity. Secondly, read as much as you can because you learn the most about writing by reading. Thirdly, think about what it is that you want to say to the world and think about why you want to be a writer and what appeals to you, and try to focus on that. Fourthly be a hard worker. It’s not all art and magic, it also involves a lot of work and it’s important to take it very seriously and work really hard.
SS: That’s great advice, thank you Susan.
You’re in LA and you’ve written for New Yorker as well. If you could hang out anywhere in the world where would you be and what would you be doing?
SO: Permanently?
SS: Just hanging out
SO: Oh gosh, that’s tough. Tokyo. I’d love to just be hanging out in Tokyo, browsing, window shopping and eating sushi.
SS: Have you been before or something you have always wanted to go to?
SO: I have been to Tokyo, but it’s been a while, and I have a real hankering to go back. It’s just a really exciting place — but I love so many places that it’s hard to pick one. I can picture one particular shopping area in Tokyo where it’s so much fun being a spectator and watching the world go round.
SS: I can only imagine. I would love to go out there. Our last question Susan. We spend so much of our time on online networks to sort of maintain relationships. Where do you see the value in taking the time to connect offline, whether it’s with your friends, followers or your peers?
SO: It’s important to remember that the world is full of subtlety and nuance. I’m online all the time and I value it and see tremendous opportunity and pleasure in it, but I think you have to remember that there is a texture to real life experience that is irreplaceable and important and refreshing. It’s very, very important to continue engaging with that, especially if you want to be a writer. I dread the idea of a world in which the writer does his or her work from a desk exclusively and is never out in the world, smelling the smells and hearing the sounds and bumping into things and having experiences, because that is what makes a story come alive.
SS: Thanks so much Susan, that was great.
SO: My pleasure.
uberlife Real Champions series: Hanging out w/ Jo Elvin
uberlife’s Real World Champions series continues this week with a chat to Jo Elvin, the intelligent and inspiring editor of the UK’s leading magazine, Glamour.
(uberlife) Sanchita: What was it that inspired and motivated you to start out on the journey in writing that lead to you being editor?
Jo: I think I was about thirteen or fourteen when I knew that out of all my subjects at school I enjoyed English writing and creative writing, I grew up in Australia, and I was obsessed particularly with English magazines.
I loved things like Smash Hits and Number one. Interestingly not so much fashion, but fueling that hormonal teenage girlie thing of crushes on pop stars and stuff like that. It was another friend of mine to put the light bulb in my head that I could combine the two. I suppose nobody really thinks like that, at that age, that I can use writing to do what I want so once I put those two things together it was all I wanted to do.
I focused on becoming a journalist and I wasn’t really sure at that age what type, I think obviously magazines were an ideal, but I didn’t think that I could just step into magazines. I knew I would probably have to go work in newspapers and all that with the goal being magazines.
Sanchita: That was very astute of you..
Jo: Well, in the olden days before the Internet, you had to do a lot of research and asking around, I was lucky in that I went to a co-ed state school, which was a good school, but it was no frills. However we did have a good careers advisor so she really helped get people work experience in the right place and things like that. I ended up in a local newspaper where they were brilliant and they answered lots of questions, I ended up meeting a woman there who was a cadet journalist, as they’re called, who took me out on loads of assignments - garbage strikes, 50th anniversaries, you know, all that sort of thing, but it was really interesting.
Years later when I was eighteen or nineteen and I’d left school; I was at university studying a communications degree, which is basically a media course. You have really long holidays in university, I was really bored and I started cold calling magazines. I called Dolly Magazine which is the biggest teenage magazine in Australia and I read it through all my informative years and I figured I’m young maybe I’ll get the chance to do more there because it’s a young magazine.
As luck would have it the woman on the phone just sort of went; ‘Yes we’re pretty booked up for work experiences (as we all say)’ then ‘Oh, I don’t see why not, so do you want to come in next week?’ so I did.
Then I was just so keen so it must of been obvious, everything from opening the post to getting the tea and coffee was a thrill for me because I couldn’t believe I was at this magazine I had read all the time. One week led to them saying ‘Do you want to come in next week?’ then ‘Do you want to come in next week?’ and then the time came when the story that changed everything for me;
The editor at the time wanted a story to find a young girl who lived in the Aussie outback, and worked on a cattle station and she had to be a certain age, reasonably attractive and be living well away from home. As I say, as it was pre-internet, so it meant I was given the task because the two feature writers were grumpy about the amount of work. It was a week’s work to sit and got through the all the yellow pages. I mean this is Australia-every huge state has its own yellow pages, so it’s like phoning cattle ranch upon cattle ranch. It took days and days and days and finally I found someone. I think we gave them the choice of one or two girls and I think the editor was really impressed I had stuck at it and got it.
So then when I had to go back to university I was going in there a couple a days that I didn’t have classes, volunteering and doing all that sort of research and vox pops in the street and that sort of thing. That’s where it started and then I’d been doing that for four or five months and I walked in one day to find the two features writers furiously packing their desks with the editor standing over them. I think they’d gone to the managing director of the company and said we think she is doing a bad job of the magazine and you should fire her and that went as well as you’d expect it to, so they ended up getting fired. Then out of desperation, I was given more work to do, then that editor left because she didn’t enjoy it, it wasn’t the right fit, and the girl I’d been on work experience with at the local paper became the editor and gave me a job.
Sanchita: You mentioned luck earlier and I think that’s very modest of you. What advice would you give to people starting out other than having luck on their side?
Jo: Yes it was lucky, I didn’t know when she said come in for work experience that it would lead to A, B and C. But also I had spent so much time undeterred, with people going ‘No, No, write a letter No, we haven’t got anything’. I probably spent about 3 days just thinking there must be somebody else I can call.
In whatever you do, whether it’s in magazines, online or newspapers, you need to be resourceful. You need to have that ‘I’m not going to give up’ attitude. What still helps all of us here, particularly when dealing with the celebrities and trying to get covers and trying to get ideas, is that when one door shuts and something’s a no or not possible, that you’re like ‘There’s got to be another way to make this happen’. It’s that kind of resourcefulness, tenacity and thick skin that you need.
There is a fine line between tenacious and annoying and I think you’ve got to know when to draw the line. I certainly, even now, have times when publicists say ‘You know what, you’re really pissing me off now, I said no.’ So you have to kind of gage that. Rejection is a fact of anybody’s life, no matter what you choose to do for a living and, I genuinely think and I know it sounds like a cliché but I was very, very lucky to find a passion for something very early on and I think it’s so important to try and find something that you want to do.
I see a lot of people come in at various levels on the magazine and they are really frustrated because they are not yet the editor, but I didn’t start with ‘One day I’m going to be the editor of a magazine.’ I started with ‘Oh my god I’m working on a magazine! Yes, throw a bucket of shit over me and I’ll do it! Yes, thank you’.
I don’t see that in a lot of people now and I definitely think that real enthusiasm and wanting to know about everything on the magazine gives you the experience and to be able to do it. It’s also is the kind of thing that makes people want to give you more and more responsibility.
I do get work experience people who come in and say ‘Jo, I’m loving it here, but I really think you’re wasting my talents, I’ve got a degree’ and I’m like ‘But everything I been asking you to do is something that if you weren’t here we would be doing - everything that we do plays a huge role on the magazine.’
It’s not all about meeting pop stars and going to the fashion shows. It’s about budget meetings, Monday evenings here, when at six o’clock someone comes in with a pile ‘this big’ of pages I’ve got to read before I go, but I love it, and you to have to love every bit of it.
Sanchita: So through your journey, is there one person or people that you have hung out with that have really inspired you?
Jo: Yes I mean tons! Marina Go who is still a big player in Australian media was the local papergirl who became the editor of Dolly magazine. She was just such a champion and so encouraging and nurturing, she gave me a really big break and started the whole thing, so she was really inspirational to me and taught me a lot. She was good at commerciality and how to appeal and speak to a huge audience.
Similarly in England Kath Brown, who until recently was executive editor of Marie Claire, launched Sugar magazine in this country and gave me the job as editor under her. She was also the deputy editor of Elle, launched Red magazine and I think she taught me how to be tough. I don’t think anybody had taught me how to be the one who has to make those unpopular decisions and go by your gut, because at the end of the day you’ve got to be happy with the decisions that you’ve made when facing your employers. She was brilliant at that and then there are lots more people who I have met.
I don’t really know Anna Wintour but I think she is just inspiring for the longevity of her career and the freshness that she still brings to that magazine and the resilience and the strength of that brand.
My US counterpart, the editor of US Glamour Cindi Leive who’s I think a little creative fireball and so lovely, and very community minded in helping and working with other Glamours when necessary. So there are tons of people.
Sanchita: Through your career or in the past 12 months there must have been highs and lows. Can you give us one pinnacle moment in your career, either in the journey or at Glamour and also a low point and how you picked yourself up, and motivated yourself to get over that.
Jo: Well let’s start with the low point, because that leads to the really high point. It was when I launched B magazine in 1997. Without dwelling on the details, less than 18 months late I got fired. It was selling pretty well but it was only selling about half of what Sugar – my previous magazine – had sold.
However Sugar was a phenomenon you know, not many people get a Sugar in their careers. It really wasn’t working between the management and me. At the time that was very devastating and for a long time I didn’t even admit that was what had happened. I’ve realised as I get older that it’s a real rite of passage and it’s actually amazing if you can learn from those lows and those failures. I remember really panicking and thinking ‘Oh god, am I actually ever going to get a job again?’ but actually I did pretty quickly, I ended up freelancing for another company EMAP who brought me in to do a bit of feature editing on that magazine and a bit of acting deputy on another magazine.’
I did that for about six months and then they offered me the editorship on New Woman magazine, that was a brilliant job as well and a really interesting magazine, in that it was really of its time and really trying to do the irreverent ladette thing and it was pretty successful at that. Had I not been kicked out the door on the younger magazine and then given the opportunities that led to a much older woman’s magazine, I wouldn’t have been on the radar to be offered Glamour. So I think that it’s really important to just try and be philosophical about those moments.
Sanchita: and roll with the punches…
Jo: Yes, It was really awful at the time and I think it’s really relevant advice in this climate. When it happened to me we weren’t looking down the barrel of the worst financial times any of us had ever known, but it’s important to remember that if you can keep strong and keep plugging away I think there is always a way to overcome those things.
The high has been wall to wall Glamour. Within I think days of it hitting the shelves we had to hurriedly print extra copies to keep up with demand. I must admit that I knew it would be successful, but I didn’t think it would be that successful and so that was a real pinch yourself moment, I mean unbelievable.
Sanchita: What do you think you nailed for that to happen?
Jo: Well, I think it was a few things, bitter competitors at the time pointed to the size…Obviously that was a real innovation, the handbag size gave us a real resting point of notice which I think was very important because it was a saturated market. But I do think that it was also it was just exactly the right time for the kind of launch we’d had.
The last big launch before Glamour was 12 years earlier in Marie Claire, and between Marie Claire and Glamour there hadn’t been a real powerhouse, glossy, commercial brand. There had been lots of women’s magazine launches like Nova, Frank, Bare, Eve, I think launched just before Glamour and they’re all really interesting and dynamic in their way but most of them were very much, sort of, anti woman’s magazine. They were trying to say ‘We want women to buy this but we’re embarrassed to be a women’s magazine so we are going to pretend. We’re going to have features about lipstick because we want the advertisers but we’re going to pretend we don’t care that much about lipsticks’ and actually I don’t think women approach woman’s magazines as their entire life view.
I think that women buy women’s magazine for a particular mood and a particular time and they want to love lipstick and shoes, so Glamour came along and we were shamelessly feminine, upbeat, happy, glossy and quite American in outlook in that way. It’s no coincidence that Sex In The City was the hugest show on the TV when we came out. I think that suddenly English women were embracing that spirit of real confidence and intelligence but with a pride in your appearance and unashamedly enjoying shoes as much as current affairs and I think we just tapped into that in a really glossy happy package.
Sanchita: Excellent and so, I don’t know if you have much time to relax but if you could be hanging out anywhere in the world, where would you be hanging out and what would you be doing?
Jo: I am pretty happy in a lot of places actually, you know the more I travel, I realise I left the best city in the world. Sydney is just so beautiful, and so easy to have that mix. You go to work in an office and then at 6 o’clock in the evening you can be down at the beach, it’s absolutely lovely. I love the food and the lifestyle and the people in Sydney. Similarly LA I think gets a divided press but I really love going to LA because I so appreciate great weather now. Where else do I love? Italy, Sicily is one of my favourite places to come on holiday and Mexico.
What I really like doing is just the really dull stuff to be honest, because I don’t get a lot of free time. It’s literally just dinners with friends and hanging around on the couch with my husband and my daughter and it’s just really simple things.
Sanchita: Final question, we spend so much of our time on online social networks where do you see the value in offline face to face networking over communicating and keeping in touch with your followers and peers by say Twitter for example?
Jo: I think that building relationships is so key to what I do. You know, email and Twitter can get you so far. The entertainment director and I are going to LA in about three weeks and we do that quite regularly because it’s really important, we feel it makes a difference to meet those publicists rather than just talk on email or the phone all the time because they have a lot of noise being bombarded at them all the time.
There is pretty much only a handful of famous people who we all want on our covers. It’s ferociously competitive. So to have that relationship where you have talked about your kids and found some commonality, which you don’t get to do unless you are having lunch or a face-to-face meeting, really does help, if they know you. It doesn’t mean you are going to get everything but if somebody knows you I find it can quite often make the difference between them giving something to you or a different magazine.
So for me, relationships are key to what I do. I chat to people all the time on email but I also make sure I have a drink with this person, or that person, or a lunch. It’s hard to quantify but it definitely makes a difference.
Sanchita: Thank you so much Jo for taking the time. It’s been really insightful
