17 Days To Nieman

Calvin Trillin, who, by the way, is a keynote speaker at this year's Nieman, in American Stories: I sometimes described what I was looking for as a story that had a beginning and a middle and an end. After a while, I had cause to recall how often people who are about to tell a story in front of the fire say, "I don't know where to begin." Looking back through some of the stories I've told over the years, I notice that I have sometimes been so conscious of trying to puzzle out the beginning that I state explicitly where it is. A story I once wrote about a couple of teenage boys from South Texas who were found with half a million dollars of cash in the trunk of their car began, "It came to…