Here are most of the overheads I used in class last night. It might be useful to copy and paste them into a separate document you can keep for your own reference.
If you’re going to build a Church of Ecology, might as well do it dramatically and audaciously. Plant it smack in the devil’s sprawling front yard and rub his nose in it. Build it in Bellevue.
The new Mercer Slough Environmental Education Center is a stunning retort to the grade-it, pave-it and supersize-it ethic that has shaped Bellevue’s built environment, just as it has every other affluent American suburb. This clump of five modest buildings doesn’t just suggest a different direction. It’s an alternate universe.
Seattle has the townhouse pox. A rash of trite, stale, and clumsy faux-Craftsman eightplexes is ripping through the city’s neighborhoods, bleeding vitality and visual interest out of the streetscapes.
Some at least offer the virtue of low price—that’s relatively “low” in the pathology of Seattle’s real estate—but we’re trading short-term affordability for long-haul blight.
+++
Two leads from The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Ehrlich
The ground had just thawed when I drove to Wyoming in 1976. It was night. All I could see of the state was white peaks, black sky, and the zigzag promenade of rabbits unwinding in front of the car . It’s said that sudden warmth drives frost deeper into the ground before it loses its grip, as if to drive home one last tentstake of numbness before the protective canvas. That’s what happened to me that year: things seemed better than they were, then took a declivitous slide before they improved.
I used to walk in my sleep. On clear nights when the seals barked and played in phosphorescent waves, I climbed out the window and slept in a horse stall. Those “wild-child” stories never seemed odd to me; I had the idea that I was one of them, refusing to talk, sleeping only on the floor. Having become a city dweller, the back-to-the-land fad left me cold and I had never thought of moving to Wyoming. But here I am, and unexpectedly, my noctambulist world has returned. Not in the sense that I still walk in my sleep—such restlessness has left me—but rather, the intimacy with what is animal in me has returned. To live and work on a ranch implicates me in new ways: I have blood on my hands and noises in my throat that aren’t human.
+++
Anecdotal lead of Sturgis Robinson’s “person” story:
She was an Amazon, indefatigable, tireless and fearless. She saved my life once in the Grand Canyon on a foolish mid-winter kayaking trip. I, of course, had brought along cheap and worn out equipment that did little to keep my skinny body warm or dry during the eight to ten hours a day we paddled down the freezing river. She found me listless and shivering along the bank, unable to help myself and already deeply hypothermic. Riverside tamarisk bushes overhung with icicles hid me; the rest of our party had passed me by. She pulled me out of my boat and peeled off my useless wetsuit and her own. She built a fire; even in the cold wind she got it lit on the first try.
+++
Scene-setting lead from a student’s “place” story about a strip club:
The mirror behind the stage is still streaked with hand prints, smudges of sweat and body oil. The girls still climb up every few dances with a spray bottle of glass cleaner and a rag wiping it up and down, back and forth, like slutty Cinderellas in their g-strings and bras. There are still black vinyl benches strewn about the room and tucked into dim corners that stick to bare thighs when you sit down. There’s that same odor of slightly rancid perfume, of roses blooming in a pasture of cigarette butts, even though smoking was banned here a year ago.
+++
A “quip” lead by Ian Frazier:
Among the cruelest tricks life plays is the way it puts the complicated part at the end, when the brain is declining into simplicity, and the simplest part at the beginning, when the brain is fresh and has memory to spare.
Two more fine “quip” leads:
It’s hard to believe that only 73 years ago, the golden Gate Bridge did not exist. The airplane is older than the Golden Gate Bridge. The particle accelerator is older than the Golden Gate Bridge. Betty White is older than the Golden Gate Bridge.
—Jennifer B. McDonald, NY Times Book Review, 8.8.10
I once worked in a New Hampshire cabinet shop with a gray-bearded guy named Paul who regularly offered only two criticisms of my craftsmanship. He would say either, “We’re not making a damn pigpen here,” or “We’re not making a damn piano here.” When I put the appropriate amount of effort into the job, he’d let me be. If Paul ever looked over Joe Greenley’s shoulder as Joe built one of his strip-built kayaks, I think he’d sputter, “We’re not building a damn Louis XIV escritoire here.”
—Christopher Cunningham, “The King,” Small Boats 2009
+++
Two quote leads:
“This is probably the best thing I’ve done in my whole life.”
Peter Gron, forty-two, is talking about his Arctic Tern, a twenty-three-foot full-keel sloop now taking elegant shape beside his home on Gabriola Island, British Columbia. There is no trace of irony or self-consciousness in his voice or expression—he means it.
—Lawrence W. Cheek, The Year of the Boat
“Hard work,” says Dicky Butts, and we haven’t even started yet.
“Get wet today,” says Truman Lock. He pulls his graying beard, squints out over the bay ...
—Bill Roorbach, “Shitdiggers, Mud Flats, and the Worm Men of Maine
+++
Two question leads:
This is a car’s-eye view of Houston—but is there any other? It is a short report on a fast trip to the city that has supplanted Los Angeles in current intellectual mythology as the city of the future ...
—Ada Louise Huxtable, “Deep in the heart of nowhere”
Like any out-of-the-way place, the Napo River in the Ecuadorian jungle seems real enough when you are there, even central. Out of the way of what? ... Of human life, tenderness, or the glance of heaven?
—Annie Dillard, “In the Jungle”
+++
Finally, a step-by-step example of my distillation process in writing leads:
First try:
Newspaper editor-turned-developer Charles Waldheim is plodding around a grassy park in downtown Mesa, dreaming out loud. His peculiar idea, which might already have been instituted if the cost hadn’t ballooned to 10 times its original projection, is a penguin park. Right here. In the middle of the Arizona desert.
Second:
It is a sunny day in downtown Mesa, and Charles Waldheim is dreaming out loud. His peculiar idea is a penguin park. Here. In the middle of the Arizona desert.
Third:
It is a sunny day in downtown Mesa, and Charles Waldheim is talking penguins.
I blue screened last night. For those lucky enough to be unfamiliar with this phrase, it is the technical term for when a computer, at an inopportune and previously unscheduled moment, chooses to roll over and die. Since both my husband and I work in the high tech industry, we have multiple backup plans in place. For our photos.