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 light because of a bad left turn.” A story I once wrote about a Louisiana woman who jousted for years with a lawyer for the state bureau of records over the question of whether her parents should have been identified on her birth certificate as “colored” or “white” began, “Susie Guillory Phipps thinks this all started in 1977, when she wanted to apply for a passport. Jack Westholtz thinks it started long before that.”
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