"I'm cynical and skeptical," the author of The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession explained. "I'm not a joiner. I don't see myself fitting in to some niche."

Susan Orlean is obsessed, just not about orchids. A passionate writer, her unlikely immersion into the South Florida orchid scene produced one of the great regional portraits of recent years, a funny history peopled with land-schemers, drug dealers, heirs to orchid fortunes, international flower hunters (many of whom die on the job), lawyers, legislators, burglars, the only Indian tribe never to surrender to the U.S. government, and a mad genius who aims to clone enough ghost orchids to stock Wal-Mart stores nationwide. Meanwhile, at the center of it all, a murky swamp filled with alligators, poisonous insects, and deadly snakes attracts ravenous collectors who'll risk prison terms to trudge for hours waist deep in standing water, packing orchids into pillowcases and sneaking them out of the state preserve.

"It's about orchids," Orlean admitted, describing her book, "but it's not really about orchids."
 

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Orlean: The Internet didn't exist when I left Portland. I'm beginning to feel like I shouldn't say that anymore because it makes me sound so old.

Dave: When did you leave?

Orlean: 1983. We didn't work on computers at Willamette Week, that's for sure. People thought it was a principled stand. I'm not going to work on computers! That's bad!

Dave: It's interesting to see readers' comments about your book. The response is generally overwhelmingly positive, but some people get really annoyed that John Laroche disappears from the story for long stretches.

Orlean: It's been funny to read those because I'm curious about what people respond to. To me, it's so clearly the case that this is a subjective telling of this experience. I also think that John Laroche wasn't necessarily the most central character. He does disappear at times.

I'd come across a report of a crime that was so peculiar, that touched so many seemingly incongruous places, communities, and subjects, that writing the book was largely a matter of unpacking those elements. In the process, each element became a story in itself, much more interesting and involved than I would have ever imagined.

I'd casually ask a question: for instance, "What was here before this was the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve?" - imagining that the answer was, "Oh it was farmland," or, "Oh, it's always just been empty land." Instead, it turned out to be the site of the biggest case of land fraud in American history, filled with its own characters and its own weird poignancy.

The book doesn't follow a linear structure. It follows my curiosity about how this event came to happen. I think a linear book about the subject would have been a complete bore.

Dave: The progression feels natural - or, it did to me. For instance, there's a long digression about the Seminole tribe where you get away from the flowers a bit to tell the story of the chief, but it makes perfect sense to explain more about the Seminoles because they're at the heart of the story.

Orlean: Then to go off from the Seminoles to talk about Chief Billy killing the panther - that law is what brought Laroche to the Seminoles in the first place, and subsequently brought them together into the swamp.

I will confess: I like to live a little dangerously as a writer. I don't want to make a digression that I wouldn't think is purposeful - sometimes it kills you, having information which is so interesting when you know it doesn't organically fit - but this is the way I examined the story. It's very true to the experience I had.

I knew very little about the history of the Seminoles, the laws and the immunity and so forth, and when I started learning about them, Chief Osceola, his persona was so huge. Yes, it was a detour, but it seemed purposeful: what was someone doing collecting Chief Osceola's head? Isn't this again a glimpse back at the idea of orchid collectors in the Victorian era? To me, these parallels built the story.

Dave: How long were you down in Florida?

Orlean: I reported on and off for close to two years. I'd go down for about two weeks at a time, then come back, and while I was back do a lot of the reporting. I tend to do all my reporting before I do my writing.

With this structure, it was more like doing sculpture than drawing. I had to think, If I put this here, I'm not going to have it for there. It was really difficult. I was kind of overwhelmed at first; I thought, I don't know if I can do this. I wrote out all the information on index cards; I spread them all over. There were certain parts of the book that I absolutely knew would be in there, so I thought, How about if I start off by writing those pieces? That was a dismal failure. I couldn't separate any part of it. I felt like I could only get to the telling of each anecdote if I knew what had come before it and how the reader came to know it.

I almost always write from the beginning to the end. I almost always work the structure out while I'm writing. Maybe that's a risky thing to do, but for me, the writing is part of learning what I figured out.

Dave: Part of the book's success stems from how informative or educational it is - I don't know what word to use without making it sound dry. That's been a problem when I've tried to explain it to people. I felt like I'd learned a lot, but at the same time, it's really entertaining. It's one of the fastest, page-turning books I've read in a long time, which is why I think it works so well: because it's neither one nor the other. It's both.

Orlean: Sometimes I think, Oh God, I don't want people to think they're learning. That's so boring! Why write about it if they could go and look up all the information at the library? Well, because they're not going to. Much the same way you could say, "Why read about the swamp when you could go see it?" Well, most people will never see it. And that's what I do for a living: I go see it and describe it.

Dave: You said writing helps you understand what you figured out. So what did you figure out?

Orlean: That you need to care deeply about something or you're going to feel lost in the universe. I've felt that from my stories before, but this really confirmed it. It's a deep instinct people have: to be able to make sense of this weird, chaotic experience of life, you have to figure out some order, some logic, something to desire. Otherwise, why wake up in the morning?

At the same time, I thought maybe that instinct was disappearing, that people are just too cynical nowadays to feel devoted to something. So maybe it didn't apply anymore. Look at me: I didn't think I was particularly devoted. I love my family and my friends - it's not that I don't care about things - but I don't identify so strongly with any one thing.

I was pleasantly surprised to realize toward the end of this process that that was entirely untrue. Not just a little bit untrue, but so wildly untrue that the obviousness of it caught me up short. I'm madly passionate about my work. There's something really important about doing it well, doing it right, and being able to say to someone, "Come read this book. It's about orchids, but it's not really about orchids." That meant so much to me that I was willing to be quite uncomfortable, walking in the swamp, and to be lonely, away from home.

It struck me as almost hilarious to suddenly think, How could I have been so oblivious? Yes, I'm cynical and skeptical. I'm not a joiner. I don't see myself fitting in to some niche. But it was exhilarating to think, Oh, this isn't so strange to me. I get it.

Dave: A reader can see that, but I can understand how you'd completely take it for granted.

Orlean: You forget. It was truly an ingenuous notion on my part.

So what did I figure out? A lot of things, but that was the most personal, the thing that had the most resonance for me. It's corny, but it is the process that sustains you. It's not the product.

Dave: You write:

"Many orchid people told me they think CITES is too broad because the real threat to endangered plants is not collectors but rather the loss of wild habitat. Collectors complain that developing countries are plowing down forests as fast as they can, destroying rare plants in the process, and collectors who will retrieve plants out of these areas are the only chance to preserve species that otherwise might vanish forever."

Orlean: I didn't want to go into it at great length. For one thing, I didn't feel that I knew enough to be spouting off, but there's no question that making it so complicated and difficult for people to collect plants out of areas being logged out is absurd. Even if people were collecting those plants for profit - and many of these collectors said they'd donate the flowers to botanical gardens - it seems there's an overriding value in not killing things, especially things that may not exist anymore.

There are lots of things about CITES that are important and supportable, but that particular fact was pretty shocking.

Dave: The book presents a very strange, extremely colorful, to be polite, portrait of Florida. Is Florida, especially South Florida, so strange because it's so isolated? That's not a theory you address much in the book.

Orlean: The other day I realized that I'd never explicitly pointed out that it's the only part of the continental United States that's barely attached. Most of it is nowhere near the rest of the United States. There's almost an island mentality there, the sense of being so separate and so surrounded by water. You get the feeling that things can just kind of drift in, or drift out and disappear. There's nowhere on the peninsula that you're not conscious of the ocean.

God knows why it's so weird. It's the heat. It's the way it looks; nowhere else looks like that in this country, just flat, and the plants are just too big. You go to Alabama and Georgia - they're hot, but they're not tropical. The bottom part of Florida marks the end of the subtropics.

I love the idea that you can create more Florida. Eighty percent of it at one time was actually swamp, and it's just been growing as they fill it in. Someone said to me, "Face it, Florida could break off and float away. It's not inconceivable." It does have that feeling.

Dave: I asked about isolation because I found another book you wrote about a part of the country that's stuck in a corner, and I experienced that place, myself. It wasn't easy to get this, but I grew up in Massachusetts, so I wanted to see it for myself: Red Sox and Bluefish and Other Things that Make New England New England.

Orlean: Oh, God. Where did you get that?

Dave: Online, from a book dealer in New Brunswick. As someone who grew up in Framingham - well, you define and contextualize the word "wicked" in here - it's hard not to be appreciative of that kind of thing.

Orlean: I'd done a column for the Globe, and it was more or less the day I quit to work on my first book [Saturday Night] that Faber & Faber called me and asked about collecting my columns into a book.

It's interesting because someone said to me today, "I was reading some of your early reviews of The Clash when you were at Willamette Week in 1978." I sort of cringed and said, "Oh, are they awful?" He said, "No, it sounds just the way you sound now."

Dave: And that was even worse, right?

Orlean: I didn't want to pursue that line of thought. But it's funny to look at this now. Thinking about what is common and what is uncommon, and how ordinary things can also be extraordinary, I guess that's something that's interested me forever.

Someone today was asking if my sister has red hair, and I said that if you don't have red hair you don't realize how much it affects a person. I was half-kidding, but it's true that you are different from Day One. Noticeably different, in a way that people attach personality traits to you. I used to fantasize about having dark hair and brown eyes; that's what I really wanted. When I see little red-haired girls now, I want to say to them, "I understand!"

There might be some common thread about fitting in and not fitting in, belonging and not belonging. Not all nonfiction writers are drawn to these kinds of topics. I don't want to get too psycho-babbly about it, but it's bred in the bone. Someone said, "Oh, you're clever to have done a book like this right when people are so into gardening." Well, the truth is that it was so utterly uncalculated. I just got hooked by the story. What hooks you . . . it's instinct. It's very organic, and I'm lucky enough to be allowed to write like this.

Dave: How long did you work for Willamette Week?

Orlean: I guess it was about three and a half years. I moved to Portland just to take a year off. I'd finished college, and I had nothing to do. I didn't want to go on to graduate school right away. I told my parents I was going to work at a law firm in preparation for law school, which I never had the slightest bit of interest in doing. In the back of my mind, I really wanted to be a writer.

I recently found a notebook I had when I was a senior in college. I'd written, What to do after college: A. Law school. B. English graduate school. C. Writer. With writing, it said, Pros: Really want to do it. Sounds like fun. Cons: Don't know how to become a writer. Possibility of not earning a living.

Being out here and stumbling on a little magazine that was starting up was incredibly good luck. From there, I started freelancing for some national magazines, then I moved to Boston. I wrote for The Phoenix, and I started my first book. Then I moved to New York while I was finishing that one, and I started writing for The New Yorker when I was there.

Dave: Okay, we're running out of time, but there are two pages of Reading Group questions in the back of the paperback edition of The Orchid Thief, and I thought it would only be fair to ask you one.

Orlean: Sure.

Dave: Question Number One: "Is there a hero in The Orchid Thief? An anti-hero?"

Orlean: I don't know . . . How would you describe what a hero is? . . .

Dave: Thirty seconds to answer!

Orlean: Okay. Yes, the hero is finally the ghost orchid for both managing to drag me and half of the human population through horrible swamps to look for it, and at the same time for remaining completely elusive, to this day invisible to me, among others. I'd say that's the hero. And the anti-hero? I don't think there's an anti-hero.

Dave: Good answer.

Orlean: Well, thanks.

Throughout the course of this conversation, Dave drank water from an old plastic squirt bottle while Susan sipped from her can of diet cola. Shortly thereafter, Susan read from The Orchid Thief, answered questions, and signed books for an appreciative audience in the new Pearl Room at Powell's City of Books. All this happened on January 14, 2000.