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Often ideas for stories can come from things we overhear people say, things that make us curious. For example, I once heard a woman say, “I’m just a drunk girl in stilettos.” Okay, I confess the woman who said it would one day be my wife. The actual facts of the story don’t matter, What matters is the instant I heard her say that, I thought, hmm. . . “Drunk Girl in Stilettos.” Now there’s an interesting title for a story. I set out to write one that would be completely different from the kind of story you’d expect from [...]

I was eighteen years old the summer Richard Nixon resigned the presidency. I was between my freshman and sophomore years of college, and I worked as a sales clerk at Sherman’s Department Store in Olney, Illinois. Each afternoon around three o’clock, my manager sent me to the drug store across the street to buy him a pack of cigarettes (Kent Deluxe 100s) and an afternoon newspaper. I brought the cigarettes and the paper and his change back to him, and then I went on about the business of straightening stacks of sport shirts and trousers, whisking a feather duster over [...]