Visualizing Nature

: Essays on Truth, Spirit, and Philosophy

By Stuart Kestenbaum

Visualizing Nature brings together contemporary visionaries to share deeply personal essays on nature, ecology, sustainability, climate change, philosophy, and more.

Compiled by editor and poet Stuart Kestenbaum, the contributors represent a wide range of backgrounds and experiences, each honoring nature’s power to heal, inspire, guide, amaze, and strengthen.

• Activist Maulian Dana of the Penobscot Nation writes on the intertwining relationship of motherhood and Mother Earth.
• Biology professor David Haskell tells the story of the resilient bristlecone pine trees, which live to be as old as 2,100 years.
• Iranian scholar Alireza Taghdarreh speaks to his experience of translating Emerson’s “Nature” into Farsi.

A previously unpublished 1962 speech by Rachel Carson complements the collection of more than twenty essays, each inviting the reader into a quiet space of reflection with the opportunity to think deeply about how they relate to the natural world.

Stuart Kestenbaum is the author of six collections of poems: Pilgrimage (Coyote Love Press), House of Thanksgiving (Deerbrook Editions), Prayers and Run-on Sentences (Deerbrook Editions), Only Now (Deerbrook Editions), How to Start Over (Deerbrook Editions), and Things Seemed to Be Breaking (Deerbrook Editions). He has also written The View from Here (Brynmorgen Press), a book of brief essays on craft and community.

In 2024, he and visual artist Susan Webster published A Quiet Book, collaborations in writing and visual art (Brynmorgen Press).

He has written and spoken widely on craft making and creativity, and his poems and writing have appeared in small press publications and magazines, including Tikkun, the Sun, the Beloit Poetry Journal, and the New York Times Magazine. He served as Maine’s poet laureate from 2016-2021 and hosted Poems from Here on Maine Public Radio/Maine Public Classical and was the host/creator of the podcasts Make Time and Voices of the Future.

He was the director of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine, for over twenty-five years, and was elected an honorary fellow of the American Craft Council in 2006. More recently, working with the Libra Foundation, he designed and implemented a residency program for artists and writers called Monson Arts.