My heart sank last month when VIDA, a women’s literary organization, revealed in its annual count of male and female bylines in book reviews, magazines, and literary journals that, in 2013, publications still largely favored men over women.

“At The New York Review of Books, there were 212 male book reviewers and 52 female; at The Atlantic, there were 14 male book reviewers and three female; at Harper’s, there were 24 male book reviewers and 10 female,” as The New York Times points out.

In some cases, assigning editors have already woken up to the call of VIDA’S starkly presented figures of previous years. In 2012, The Paris Review had 70 male bylines and 18 female; in 2013, it was nearly even, with 47 male bylines and 48 female.

In recent weeks, I’ve returned to one of my most indispensable collections, The New New Journalism: Conversations with America’s Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft, with VIDA’s findings in mind. In these interviews, editor Robert S. Boynton, who has been director of New York University’s graduate magazine journalism program, senior editor at Harper's, and a contributing writer for The New Yorker, focuses on the evolution of the "New Journalism" movement as pioneered by writers like Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, and Gay Talese a half-century ago.

Of Boynton’s nineteen featured writers, including Talese, Jon Krakauer, and Ted Conover, only three are women: Jane Kramer, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, and Susan Orlean. While each is a brilliantly immersive reporter -- LeBlanc spent nearly ten years reporting on a family in the South Bronx for Random Family, and Kramer, in her many books and contributions to The New Yorker as European correspondent, deftly navigates cultural boundaries to bring new worlds to us -- the pages containing insights by Susan Orlean are my most dog-eared. They are also most worth celebrating in light of VIDA’s findings for their contagious, often unapologetically feminine energy.

The New Yorker writer and author of The Orchid Thief (which inspired the 2002 Spike Jonze film "Adaptation"), The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup: My Encounters with Extraordinary People, and My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere, among other titles, has achieved in her professional life what seems to be the ideal balance of masculine and feminine energy required for bold and perceptive reporting. Here we’ve compiled our favorite quotes from Orlean’s New New Journalism interview for their embodiment of this beautiful dance. If they inspire young women writers to access all parts of themselves -- masculine, feminine, and everything in between -- in going after and publishing stories that excite them, we look forward to seeing that development reflected in VIDA's numbers.

“My requirements for a story are purely emotional, intuitive, and visceral.”

“Writing is all about engaging people, seducing them to be interested in a story they ordinarily wouldn’t care about.”

“My vulnerability is important to reporting, too. It can be quite uncomfortable to have orchid growers yapping at me in Latin, and having to say that I don’t understand. It is crucial for me to stay receptive and impressionable, to keep worrying. It is like a stubborn sore, it is a little painful, but it keeps me open.”

“If you asked the people I write about to characterize me, I think they’d say I was a little younger than I am, and a little bit more shy than I am. A little more naïve than I am. People sometimes have the impulse to mother me, which I don’t discourage. I don’t play dumb or helpless, but I try not to come off as slick and sophisticated. It is useful but the fact is that this is often the way I feel: far from home, nervous about the story, somewhat exposed.”

"A journalist, by definition, invades and stirs up people's lives. We don't wreck or change them substantially, but the fact is that we are invaders."

“I don’t use my own life experiences as a way to lubricate the conversation, as a way of creating empathy ('Boy, I can really understand what you’re feeling because I once…'). It is partly because for most of the people I write about I just wouldn’t have a parallel in my life. I’m an enthusiastic listener and a nonjudgmental observer, and that is how I create empathy.”