TO OUR READERS

By BRUCE HALLETT PRESIDENT

FOR ANYONE CURIOUS ABOUT WHAT it is like to work at TIME, Calvin Trillin's 1980 novel, Floater, is required reading. The story of a hapless writer at a national weekly newsmagazine suspiciously like this one, it skewers some of TIME's most revered traditions, including this very page. Though Trillin now tries to pretend that Floater is "made up," he in fact gathered inside information during nearly three years on TIME's staff. In 1960, after graduating from Yale and serving in the Army, he joined the Atlanta bureau, reporting on the civil rights movement. He then moved to New York, where he became a "floater," writing for various sections of the magazine as needed. To avoid Religion stories, he has said, he attached the word "alleged" to every event of religious significance, as in "the alleged Crucifixion" or "the alleged parting of the Red Sea." The tactic never worked. "[The editors] just crossed it out," Trillin confesses. "If there was anything they had had experience with, it was smart-aleck writers."

Happily, no hard feelings remained. With this issue, Trillin's deadpan humor and lucid prose return to the pages of TIME as a regular feature. He will be writing a weekly column on a characteristically far-reaching range of subjects. "Sometimes it'll be about Washington," he says. "Sometimes it'll be about what's in my basement." Whatever he turns his attention to is usually just fine with his readers. "Trillin is one of the great delights of American journalism," says managing editor Walter Isaacson. "He has the eyes and ears of a great reporter."

Since his first stint at TIME, Trillin's wry political commentary, his accounts of gastronomical journeys in search of the perfect barbecue and his compassionate reportage of small-town America have appeared in the New Yorker, where he is a staff writer, in a syndicated newspaper column and in the Nation, to which he contributes a weekly poem (a genre he took up during the Bush Administration when the phrase "If you knew what John Sununu" came to him in an inspired flash). His 19th book, Messages from My Father, is to be published this spring.

Not everything comes easily to Trillin, 60, who lives in a Greenwich Village brownstone with his wife Alice. His new column, he worries, is slightly shorter than the one he is accustomed to writing. As a result, he modestly warns, "the readers are going to have to get their profound thoughts somewhere else." That, as Trillin admirers well know, is only allegedly true.