Look and Listen

Biography

Susan Orlins, an award-winning journalist, began chronicling her worries in 2009 on her blog, Confessions of a Worrywart. She also contributes to Huffington Post and writes about food, relationships, travel, and more on NBC Universal’s Life Goes Strong website. Orlins has published in The New York Times, Newsday, The Pennsylvania Gazette, and The Washington Post Magazine. For several years, she was a contributing editor at Moment Magazine, where she received a Rockower Award for her profile of sociolinguist Deborah Tannen. After adopting an infant in China in 1986, Orlins wrote a letter home that appears in Women’s Letters: from the Revolutionary War to the Present. Chicken Soup for the Soul published her essay “Marathon Women” in Like Mother, Like Daughter, Our 101 Best Stories. In addition to her roles of worrywart, writer, and mother, she identifies most strongly as a bicycle rider. But don’t mistake her for a sleek, zippy cyclist hunched over racing-style handlebars. She is none of that. Rather, you will find her in the streets of Washington, D.C., New York City, and Beijing, plodding along high and upright, arms spread wide, more Mary Poppins than Lance Armstrong. Orlins is the divorced mother of three daughters in their twenties and thirties, who are what she worries about most. She leads a nonfiction workshop for homeless people in Washington, D.C., where she lives with her aging pound hound, Casey, about whom she also worries.

Inspiration

Gretchen Rubin