Susan Orlean tells her own story

The New Yorker writer's new memoir, “Joyride.” Plus: Kate Sosin on covering trans issues and avoiding burnout.

October 17, 2025

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Dear Storyboard community:

In Manjula Martin’s deep-dive Nieman Storyboard annotation of Susan Orlean’s classic Esquire feature, “The American Man, Age Ten,” Orlean was asked how she managed to blend in with a swarm of young kids at a New Jersey pizzeria to report out her 1992 profile of an ordinary fifth-grader named Colin Duffy.

“I’m lucky to be small enough to escape too much notice,” she said, “and I've mastered the art of invisibility when I need to.”

Orlean, a 2004 Nieman Fellow and longtime New Yorker staff writer, is embracing a higher level of visibility this week with the publication of her first memoir, “Joyride.” She writes in the opening chapter:

I noted recently that it has been twenty-five years since I published “The Orchid Thief,” and that unit of time, the quarter-of-a-century monumentality of it, stirred me to think about where I’ve been and where I’m going, and what I’ve seen and learned along the way. I’ve always dreaded the idea of writing a memoir. I’m used to looking outward, not inward; I yearn to bring attention to hidden worlds, not to my own. I’m proud of my work, and I want the widest readership I can muster, but I hate vanity. I’m used to convincing my subjects that their quiet lives are shimmering and gorgeous and worth talking about, but it’s been harder to convince myself of that about my own. Yet here I am. This is my story; please listen.

Orlean’s story of the 10-year-old boy was the kind of assignment freelance journalists dream of: no news peg, no celebrities, and no limits on following her curiosity. Throughout her career, she's been encouraged by editors to seek out the “small” stories but, as she tells New York magazine, “I don’t think smallness is in itself a virtue. Writers have to figure out how to make a small story seem urgent. They have to sell it.”

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What is the role of small stories in this urgent moment? It might feel extravagant or even distracting to spend any time on stories that eschew the news cycle. This week at Storyboard, journalist Kate Sosin talks to contributor Carly Stern about covering LGBTQ+ issues for nonprofit news outlet The 19th. Sosin said that covering a mix of subject matter is critical to ensure that both readers and journalists do not burn out. As Sosin shares:

The only news that’s written for trans people is so devastating that if you just read trans news, you would not want to exist in the world after reading it. As a trans person, I have to write news that makes me want to get up in the morning. So I need to find a way to tell stories that are more constructive than just, “Here's another thing that has been taken away from you.”

But I also just don't feel that way about what's happening in the world. Our present moment is in a backlash because there's been so much progress made. I have a responsibility to communicate that what is happening is the result of incredible progress. We have to be responsible about it and not just information dump. I'm not looking for a silver lining as much as I am looking for an honest balance.

Sosin tells Storyboard about their journey to covering LGBTQ+ stories, and their recommendations to other journalists for how to thoughtfully cover trans issues.

Journalist Kate Sosin on covering trans issues in the age of Trump 2.0

“Don't follow the news or be responsive to it. Create the news.”

[ Read the story ]

Links of note

Mario Guevara in detention. Photo courtesy The Bitter Southerner Magazine.

Journalist Mario Guevara, who has lived in the U.S. since 2004 and worked for many years in Spanish-language media, was deported to his home country of El Salvador last Friday after spending more than 100 days in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facilities. He was detained in June by ICE while covering the first “No Kings” protest in Georgia. Be sure to read his harrowing first-person letter from ICE detention, published in The Bitter Southerner Magazine in September.
On accessing a writing flow state by tuning into the body: In Jenni Gritters’ interview with writer and coach Dani Fankhauser, Fankhauser frames creative flow as reception. “What we call creative flow is just nervous system regulation and intuition. It’s not active; it’s receptive,” she told Gritters. “The discipline we need to write well is to persistently get ourselves into a bliss state. Good writing feels more like listening than doing.” (Hat-tip: Carly Stern.)
Over at The Hat (a new theater publication co-founded by Storyboard contributor Kara Cutruzzula), artist Zoë Kim discusses the process of writing and performing a one-person show, “Did You Eat? (밥 먹었니?)” which made its New York City debut this week at the Public Theater. Kim offers some inspiring advice for fellow storytellers: “The cavalry isn’t coming. You are your cavalry. I made what I could because I needed to make something, and I did that on my own. Nobody gave me any financial support. I had no one. I knew no one. I knew nothing. I had nothing. It turned out that I was the biggest opportunity that I was waiting for. The cavalry isn’t coming. You are.”
Lessons from a live storyteller: At her newsletter Sound Judgment, Elaine Appleton Grant has a fantastic interview with Aaron Calafato, whose popular “7 Minute Stories” podcast features short personal stories from his life. He shares how he quickly sets a scene: “I only have a little bit of time [to tell the story]. How do I quickly establish the environment? Usually I do something very simple and easy to understand because I’m not Dickens, where I can spend six pages describing a wall. I always go to the universal — the crunching of leaves. If the crunching of leaves senses something for me, it senses something for everybody.”