Susan Orlean, Twitter, and the new-media pecking order

susanorlean BTW, my animal sitter at home reports that Laura has become a total raging maniac rooster madman, complete with rooster rage. Oy. – November 11, 2009

In a grassy upstate-New York yard fit for farming, Susan Orlean gives a camera crew for The New Yorker a tour of her utility shed. Half of the shed is occupied by seven chickens. Outside the shed is a fenced-in area, resembling a petting zoo. Chickens zoom past the cameras as Orlean squats down just inside the yard. Three birds rush over to snack on the tomato half in their dutiful owner’s hands.

Orlean points to a black-feathered bird with white specks and a scarlet crest. “This chicken was a sweet little chicken,” she says. “The guy I bought her from had named her Laura, after the character in The Glass Menagerie, and she’s turned out to be a rooster. A big shock to everybody.”

Almost every day, Orlean writes one-liners just like that about her chickens on Twitter. It started with her just tweeting her life, discussing her family and career. Then something clicked. Her fans fixated on the birds. They followed her chicken tweets, re-tweeted them to friends, and tweeted her back. It became a chicken-tweet movement, inquiries about chickens flying fast at Orlean. All the while her following proliferated, growing to six thousand by last June:

susanorlean Do I get a toaster or something when I hit 6000 followers? – June 19, 2009

susanorlean Whoa! Send toaster immediately! –June 21, 2009

Eight thousand in July:

susanorlean Hey, thank you all for pushing me into the toaster-and-a-blender category (8000 followers—but I know you just love me for my chickens). – July 10, 2009

And double that today (and growing).

With all of this notice, the natural next step for a staff writer at The New Yorker was to pitch a piece to her editor.

susanorlean Got a thumbs-up on my chicken story, so I’ll let you all know when it’s running. My editor’s comment? “Buk buk”. – September 8, 2009

On September 28, 2009, The New Yorker published the anticipated Orlean chicken tale, “The It Bird: The return of the back-yard chicken.” The story chronicles her impulse to purchase egg-laying hens and her discovery that she is a part of growing trend. The article is characteristically provocative, a survey on the suburban life of the egg-laying fowl intermixed with the dry wit of Orlean’s Twitter feed.

“Chickens seem to be the perfect convergence of the economic, environmental, gastronomic, and emotional matters of the moment,” Orlean writes. “I do detect a little overripening on the edges—I’ve noticed some late-stage phenomena such as chicken diapers, for people who want their chickens as house pets.”

Orlean argues that chickens will endure, and have endured, through all manner of fads, whether as farm animals, pets, as food producers in hard times, or as designer-bred show-chickens. Today, they are poster chicks for the organic and local-food movements. But it is Orlean’s sentiments as a pet-chicken owner that brought thousands to her feed. These readers engage with Orlean in a way impossible even five years ago. Orlean involves them in her creative process through tweets, which in turn motivates her audience to read her print stories.

The effect of the pre-publication Tweets is impossible to quantify, but there is a sixth-sense among those involved that the build up to the story increased popularity for “The It Bird.”  Jamie Leifer, a public relations representative for The New Yorker, explained that metrics on print stories aren’t tracked, but the Orlean video was the most streamed video the week “The It Bird” ran and number three the following week.

“I had an enormous reaction to this piece,” Orlean explained over email in January 2010, adding that she did six radio and two television interviews after the story went to print. “It was clearly talked about, passed around, noticed, commented upon, and I have no doubt that talking about it in advance on Twitter primed the pump. That may not be hard evidence but it’s certainly real in terms of the sensation of a writer experiencing an audience.”

Consider “The It Bird” as a case study in contemporary media, an example of literary and social media fostering a new engagement with narrative. Carefully cultivating her audience, Orlean pushes them to appreciate her prose. Her openness, her chickens, and her enigmatic twit-wit keeps Orlean’s feed at the top of her reader’s pecking order.

susanorlean One benefit of writing a story about chickens: Every time you write the word “chicken,” it’s amusing.  – August 17, 2009

—Shelly Runyon

{Shelly Runyon lives and writes in Boston Massachusetts. She is currently enrolled as a MLA Journalism degree candidate at Harvard University Extension School.}

A recent piece in the Columbia Journalism Review set me on edge. In “The Rise of True Fiction,” my colleague Alissa Quart writes about a trend she perceives in the literary landscape: “an increase in the blurring of neat and certain categories of ‘fiction’ and ‘nonfiction’ into something that we might call ‘true fiction.’”

I would recommend the essay to anyone practicing fiction, nonfiction, or memoir, with some caveats.

Quart launches her column by discussing The Hurt Locker, a fictional action-movie whose “forensic, formalist style” she writes, aligns it with documentaries or biopics. (The film is rooted in a deeply reported article originally published in Playboy, and its author worked hand-in-glove with the film’s director.) Then Quart mentions books whose authors do the deep reporting, then depart from strict facts in their books—for example, A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge, by Josh Neufeld, What Is the What, by Dave Eggers, and Half Broke Horses, by Jeannette Walls. The latter calls her recent book about her grandmother a “true life novel.”

So far, I’m with Quart. The list of writers who report or conduct historical research and then write fiction based on real-life stories is long and broad: in addition to the trio Quart mentions (Orwell, Capote, Mailer), there are Mark Twain (whose reporting set up his satire), John Steinbeck (whose journalism informed The Grapes of Wrath), and contemporary novelists whose deep historical research makes their fiction come alive, like David Guterson (Snow Falling on Cedars), and Ian McEwan (Atonement). And let’s not forget Shakespeare, whose history plays were based on the lives of English kings and used events like The Wars of the Roses as departure points.

It’s when Quart starts talking about nonfiction that I begin to quibble. Or, in certain cases, quake. She makes the surprising assertion that “the category ‘nonfiction’ no longer has the frisson it once did or the assurance that a book or film will sell.” Tell that to Dexter Filkins, whose balancing of journalistic restraint and downright eloquence found expression in The Forever War. Or to Anne Hull, whose reporting on Walter Reed won her the Pulitzer, among other awards. Or to Adam Hochschild, whose King Leopold’s Ghost hardly disappeared into remainder bins.

(And when has there ever been “assurance” that an important work of nonfiction would find a commercial audience?)

Quart, who is a fellow this year at the Nieman Foundation, where I teach narrative journalism, quotes another colleague, Andrea Pitzer, the editor of the Narrative Digest: “The newshole for narrative nonfiction is shrinking,” Pitzer says. “You have to have a lot of dazzle to get it published at all. Letting the work go over a little to fiction lets it be more salable.”

The newshole may indeed be shrinking, but no editor I know would prefer a piece, however dazzling, that departed from fact over one with startling news or insight. There is a big difference between letting work “go over a little to fiction” and borrowing the techniques of fiction, which is, I suspect, what Pitzer meant. (Full discloser: I was the editor of the Digest for two years; Pitzer succeeded me.)

But since when are those techniques—plotting a drama, crafting character, describing scenes, capturing dialogue, parceling out details to heighten suspense, finding a narrative voice—the province of fiction anyway? Most of us consider them just elements of great writing, any great writing.

Quart says hipster online editor Larry Smith suggests that the graphic novel A.D. is just journalism in a new guise, and she quotes John D’Agata, the editor of the new anthology The Lost Origins of the Essay, who asks “Do we read nonfiction in order to receive information, or do we read it to experience art?”

Perhaps the problem is the word nonfiction, which may be so broad as to blur some important lines. I would argue that we indeed read journalism—news stories, whether told in a straight news style or in an artful narrative style—for information, and we want that information to be credible and fair. We read narrative journalism—factual stories told using writerly (not fictional) techniques like plot, suspense, description, and artful language—for information, too; it tells us something important about our world. And we read essays and even blogs for the ideas of their writers. Art—and certainly artfulness—can surface into any of these forms, but the primary reason to read nonfiction is to learn factual truths about our world.

Memoir, one the other hand, is a form that does slide away from reported facts and toward remembered impressions. That, indeed, we read for its emotional rather than factual truths.

In the end, perhaps we blur lines by lumping a variety of genres writing into the binary categories of “fiction” and “nonfiction.”

—Constance Hale

Look in this space for selections from my collection of all-time favorite pieces, spiced with some recent stories.

These will usually be works of literary nonfiction, but I couldn’t resist launching with this shortie from the May 4 New Yorker. Titled “Buzzed,” it’s a hilarious fantasy by Noah Baumbach about what happens when scientists, curious about the biochemistry of addiction, dropped liquefied freebase cocaine on bees’ backs.

The number of sites that post graceful writing grows every day. You can’t go wrong at The New Yorker’s online incarnation, and many other magazines offer interesting experiments in new media. I’m on the lookout for beautifully written blogs, in which masterful writers explore the form and manage to do much more than whine, pine, and opine. More on that soon, I hope.

In the meantime, if you want to read great examples of narrative journalism, the Narrative Digest offers a new batch of stories, as well as commentary and various resources, every two weeks. The site is published by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.

The production of a group of ambitious and talented reporters in Florida, Gangrey has been called “a well-kept candy shop open to anyone who appreciates good writing.” It features mainly news stories from around the country, as well as spirited discussion of them, as well as of the changing platforms of journalism.

Speaking of changing platforms, make sure not to miss Interactive Narratives, produced by the Online News Association. The site’s tagline reads “the best in multimedia storytelling,” and the focus here is truly on the merging of text, audio, video, and graphics.