Denise Stoughton has spent years writing a fluttering of love letters to Bainbridge Island. Not all of them have been in written form.
There are probably more efficient ways to express affection for a place.
Denise Stoughton has not, historically, shown much interest in them.
Her affection for Bainbridge Island has appeared in The Seattle Times, on Evening, in exhibitions and festivals, arts and cultural projects, and a documentary. More recently, it has resulted in a surprising amount of activity involving a glacial erratic painted to resemble a frog.
The medium changes, the impulse behind it rarely does.
Stoughton is drawn to the things that give a place its particular character—the peculiar, the overlooked, the locally beloved. Things that can appear inconsequential right up until someone stops to ask why they matter.
She tends to be that someone.
And once interested, she has proved rather poor at leaving things alone.
Sometimes she writes the story. Sometimes she puts it on television. Sometimes she builds an experience around it.
Sometimes, apparently, she builds a parade float.
Long before Frog Rock occupied quite so much of her imagination, there were the fabulous mailboxes of Bainbridge Island—those wonderfully individual roadside declarations that turn the mundane business of receiving the electric bill into an opportunity for self-expression.
The mailboxes eventually carried her considerably farther afield, on a pilgrimage to the famous Kindred Spirit Mailbox among the dunes of Bird Island, North Carolina. The fascination followed her home, naturally, becoming Kindred Spirit, with installations at Fort Ward and the Bainbridge Island History Museum.
At Arts & Humanities Bainbridge, the subjects changed constantly. An artist. An exhibition. A festival. A cultural tradition. The story might become a piece of writing, a social campaign, a television segment or something else entirely. Stoughton became the person people came to when something needed telling, then routinely devoted a somewhat unreasonable amount of herself to telling it well.
Different subjects. Different forms. The same instinct:
Look closely. Find the thing that makes a place itself. Then make other people look, too.
Frog Rock, unfortunately for everyone involved, proved unusually difficult for Stoughton to leave alone.
What began with a peculiar and beloved piece of Bainbridge folk culture has since grown into historical research and preservation, a documentary, collaborations with artists and local businesses, community celebrations, a Food Trail, a historic-register nomination and—because apparently none of that was sufficient—a parade float.
There is a children's book beginning to stir, too.
None of this is, strictly speaking, a reasonable response to a painted rock.
Stoughton appears comfortable with that.
Perhaps irrationality has been getting a bad rap.
There are stories we preserve because everyone agrees they are important. And then there are the smaller ones—the local peculiarities, private affections and bits of collective memory that become important precisely because someone cared enough to notice them.
Stoughton notices them.
Then, regrettably, she gets ideas.
Apparently, Denise also does perfectly rational work.
The same instinct can, fortunately, be put to work for other people.
Denise works in PR, marketing and communications: finding the angle, shaping the message, dreaming up the idea and figuring out what should happen next. Sometimes that's a press release or media pitch. Sometimes it's a campaign, a launch, an event or a piece of writing. And sometimes it's recognizing that the interesting story isn't the one everyone thought they were supposed to tell.
She calls it putting the pen to work.
When the pen isn't working, she's increasingly inclined to let it wander.
Living in Cursive is where the essays, observations and books live—or will, as soon as she finds somewhere quiet enough to write them.
Preferably somewhere with a door.
Inevitably, with two Chihuahuas on the other side of it.
Apparently, The Irrational Storyteller takes commissions.