This paper proposes the special issue on the theme “Opening and Maintaining Face-to-Face Interaction.” The articles in this special issue jointly regard “how to begin” either a novel meeting or a novel sequence after a course in conversation. Before presenting them, this paper clarifies up-to-the-minute findings from conversation analytic inquiry on how people start encounters, sketching the modular parts that people oft employ to form the copresent opening stage of interaction. Data are in American English. All articles analyze naturally occurring, video-recorded episodes of casual and/or institutional copresent interaction using multimodal conversation analytic methods. Though the opening phase of a face-to-face encounter may elapse in a matter of seconds, this article shows it to house a dense universe of phenomena central to sustaining our human sense of self and our social relationships in everyday life. Before introducing the individual contributions to this special issue, this article elucidates state-of-the-art findings from conversation analytic research on how people begin encounters, delineating the modular components that people regularly use to constitute the copresent opening phase of interaction. Data in American English.