About Orion Quin

I write as Orion Quin. My name is Noah Wickliffe, and the pen name is an inheritance, not a disguise.

My grandfather, Mike Quin, was a San Francisco labor writer in the 1930s and '40s. His allegiance was to the voiceless: the dockworkers, farmhands and laborers who built this country with their hands and their blood and rarely got a word in about how it was run. His books, including Dangerous Thoughts, are held in the Library of Congress. Pancreatic cancer took him in 1947, at forty-one.

My grandmother, Mary King O'Donnell, was a novelist who wrote about people and the human condition. Her Those Other People (1946) takes place in a single day in the French Quarter and gives its ordinary people the attention most books save for heroes.

I never got to know my grandfather, and I knew my grandmother only as a small boy. But I inherited their love of writing and their instinct to champion the ordinary person. The name and the work are how I honor them. More about Mike Quin and Mary King O'Donnell

I didn't come to writing the way they did. I came to it through the body.

I rowed for Cal, and in 1998 I finished a master's degree in exercise physiology. Most of my career since has been spent practicing exercise as medicine, well before it had that name, helping people manage injury, illness and chronic disease.

What I kept seeing, first coaching competitive rowers while I was still in graduate school and then for decades in clinical practice, was that physiology explained only one part of how the body works. A person's emotional interior had as much to do with their performance and recovery as the training, the medicine or the exercises did. There was a part of being human that the textbooks hadn't yet identified, and it was influencing every system we were trying to heal. Understanding it became my life's work.

That is what I write about here. The body, the mind, and whatever we mean by spirit are not separate departments, so this site covers exercise, psychology, spirituality, politics, and the absurd, which in my experience is where the other four eventually end up.

My grandfather wrote as a form of protest, and so do I, with a slightly different weapon: following the evidence wherever it leads, even when it overturns what I thought I knew, and refusing to swallow the bullshit we're fed. I also write Dangerous Thoughts, a civic journalism project that picks up where his books left off. And I've built two platforms: SportsFlow, which helps people understand their training and their inner experience together, and Flowbase, which serves rowing clubs and the rowing community.

I should be clear about what I'm not. I'm not enlightened. The book I'm working on is called Still Not Enlightened, and the title is a status report. I don't believe in magic pills or shortcuts, whether in the gym, in love, or on the meditation cushion. Most of what actually works is simple, slow, and has to be done again tomorrow. I know a fair amount about a few things, and the more I learn, the more questions I have. I write as one of the readers, not from somewhere above them, and I'm fallible on every subject here, including the ones I've spent my life on. If anyone tells you they have the one answer to anything, walk away. That includes me.

Advice is worth what you paid for it, and everything here is free. If something doesn't ring true, set it down and come back to it later, or don't. And if you have a question, ask it. That's what this place is for.

— Orion