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A Quiet Book: Collaborations in Writing and Visual Art by Stuart Kestenbaum ’73 and Susan Webster

October 28, 2024

Tags Alumni Book

More than 50 organic collages and hand-crafted musings complement each other as naturally as do their creators, the husband-and-wife team of printmaker Susan Webster and poet Stu Kestenbaum.

They have this to say about their process: “From the start, whenever we have made our collaborative art pieces, we don’t actually work together in the same space. We work separately, passing work back and forth, without conversation. Perhaps because we’ve known each other for a long time, we find being in this unspoken place allows us to communicate differently. As in any making process, there is something beneath it or within it that we’re trying to get at (or it’s trying to get at us). In this back-and-forth between our studios, we are thrilled when we discover something unexpected — something that is more than the two of us emerging.”

Kestenbaum, the author of six collections of poetry and a book of essays, served as Maine’s poet laureate from 2016 to 2021. For A Quiet Book, he crafted his reflections by making letters out of dots as a way to slow himself down and concentrate more. He acknowledges that he never knows where his words will take him — he is limited only by a “box” he’s traced that matches the size of Webster’s print.

 “It’s an improvisation within a specific space,” he says. “Sometimes I stretch letters out when I need to fill the right-hand margin; other times I make letters smaller to get the final word in as I reach the end. I feel like I’m a cross between a Torah scribe and a jazz musician.”

As for Webster, the raw material for the book’s collages come from small fragments of unresolved prints and drawings that she had been storing away in a shoe box. “Like assembling pieces of a puzzle, over time each segment eventually finds its proper place. … A world of possibility exists for every collage, and it’s my job to discover it.”