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Former U.S. poet laureate Ted Kooser writes that Stu Kestenbaum’s poems are “heartfelt responses to the privilege of having been given life . . . set down with craft and love.” Poet Naomi Shihab Nye calls him a “poet of immense fluency, elegance, and deep humanity.” His wife calls him “funny” and says that she fell in love with him in the first 15 minutes of conversation, but he took a little longer, two years. They have now been together for almost 30, and are the parents of two grown sons they consider their finest collaborations.
Critic Carl Little has written of Susan Webster, “[Her] awareness of the preciousness of time on earth heightens both her personal sense of existence and the art she creates.” Her work has been exhibited at Elan Fine Art, the Turtle Gallery, the Manhattan Graphics Center in New York City, and others. She has been an artist in residence in many states and taught extensively.
Her husband travels a lot, too. A visiting writer at many universities,
Kestenbaum has also served as a juror and panelist at the Smithsonian Craft Show, the Philadelphia Museum of Arts Craft Show, and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. He continues to publish poetry in many journals, including The Sun and the Beloit Poetry Journal, adding to the significant body of work collected in his three books, Pilgrimage, House of Thanksgiving, and Prayers and Run-on Sentences.
For almost 20 years, Kestenbaum has been the director of Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, where the two make their home. They recently purchased and renovated a large Victorian, once an inn, on Route 15 in the village, only doors from Haystack’s winter quarters. For the first time in life they can walk to work.
In recent years Webster and Kestenbaum have collaborated on significant projects integrating words and images. In 2004, 24 of their pieces were included in the Couples exhibition at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art. They are at work on a new collaboration. When they are not working in their own individual forms, collaborating on art projects, or enmeshed in the demanding, cyclical pace of Haystack, they may be found jamming—Webster on bass and Kestenbaum on electric guitar, with a high-energy, eclectic blues band.
What were your strongest artistic influences and memories as a child?
Kestenbaum: My father owned a gas station. Family lore is that the Depression stopped him from becoming a journalist. He was always careful with words, always did the New York Times crossword puzzle—
Webster: —while he listened to classical music—
Kestenbaum: —and watched the Yankees. [They both laugh.] I used to observe things, and I remember him saying, “That’s what writers do, they observe things.” When I was about 10, we were driving by Dutch Boy Paints on the Garden State Parkway and I said the air smelled like Vaseline. He said, “Write that down.”
Susan, what about you?
Webster: My parents were florists and I’d get into the ribbons and the pins, make doll kinds of objects. I was 9 or 10. Back then sales slips had carbon paper and I remember taking all the carbon paper out and drawing on it and seeing the transformation properties of that simple kind of gesture. It was magical just like the printmaking I do now. It’s magical, serious stuff that you can’t control. And I studied piano from the time I was about 7, most of the time with a painter who lived an exotic life. He was an enormous influence on me.
Where were you both at in your artistic careers when you met?
Kestenbaum: I was writing poetry and I was a potter, too, trying to combine words and clay. I was pretty literal, less fluid than I am now. But when I saw Susan’s work—she was doing figurative work then—I responded to the kind of imagery, the mythic quality. Actually, we responded to each other’s work.
Webster: We did. We may have been at the beginnings of our careers and still exploring, but we were both pretty established in our direction.
How does running an organization of the magnitude of Haystack impact your own work?
Kestenbaum: It’s pretty busy and when we’re in season I can’t create much. But being around that kind of creativity has inspired me to do more.
Webster: The whole world comes to you: New York City, India, Japan, Bangor, everywhere, with this purpose of discovery. I love the quality of conversation, the quality of inspiration, but I need to breathe. Stu has this wonderful way of taking in and not taking in.
Kestenbaum: If I were directing a place where the management of it were separate from the activity of it, then I think it would be a problem.
How do you work?
Webster: I go through periods of time gathering materials, considering the foundations of a piece. For the last four or five years, I’ve been working with leaf imagery. Once I’ve committed to a body of work, I go right into it.
Kestenbaum: In terms of our working styles, both of us are able to consider and process, to save up quite a bit, and then have a burst of productive creativity, which, now that I think of it, mirrors the Haystack rhythm.
Webster: And when you and I work together, that’s definitely so.
You’ve been collaborating on art projects for about 10 years now. How do you work out the thorny issues?
Kestenbaum: We’re pretty good when we’re working together. We hit a certain rhythm. If we were thinking about what exit to take to get out of Brooklyn, that might be thornier.
Webster: We did lay down some guidelines though. Definitely cooperation and listening to one another have been part of our process, and I’d have to say that I’m the person who had to work at listening more carefully.
Kestenbaum: First time I’ve heard that. [They both smile.]
Talk about the pieces you created for the Couples exhibition at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art.
Webster: When we decided to do this body of work, Stu was very clear that he wanted his words to be read—they weren’t intended to just be a graphic. When we figured out that this work was a shared response to a shared event and shared feeling, I knew I couldn’t complete the pieces. I had to leave space for Stu’s words to complete each one. That was a new way of working.
Kestenbaum: Susan would make the print, leaving a space for me to print the words [He uses rubber stamps to print
each letter], but I would decide the orientation.
Webster: Sometimes that was so jarring. Even though I knew it wasn’t mine to decide, I couldn’t help projecting
further to some kind of compositional resolution.
Kestenbaum: I know.
Webster: We’ve been together a long time and have families and lives, and work resonates with us. We know each other
so well.
Kestenbaum: There’s a quality that appeals to me that’s like improvisation. I don’t know whether you feel this way. What each one of us does is intended to support the other. Like music.
Webster: That’s true. And once we’ve started, we don’t try to influence each other.
Was there a theme to this series?
Kestenbaum: I don’t usually say this, but I’ll flip over all the cards here. My brother died in the World Trade Center. I didn’t want to name it because I didn’t want to trivialize it, like oh you should look at these because it’s about . . . because—
Webster: —it is and it isn’t.
Kestenbaum: Our sense of what loss could be seemed exponential then, and you realize you could stretch your arm out over here or here, and there’s loss. Loss is not unique. It happens every day to everybody.
With both of you, a sense of place seems to bleed through all of your work. Is that conscious?
Kestenbaum: It’s not conscious, but place anchors me.
Webster: I’m attracted to imagery that has a sense of place.
Kestenbaum: And place is very much about this place, Deer Isle, the light, the austerity, the community.
Webster: And it’s also about relationships. We have an artistic relationship, an emotional one, a working one, a geographical one, a familial one.
In order to make all that work, are there boundaries you’ve established that you won’t cross?
Kestenbaum: I’d think the line would be when you want somebody to make what you want them to make.
Webster: Or be what you want them to be.
Critic Carl Little has written of Susan Webster, “[Her] awareness of the preciousness of time on earth heightens both her personal sense of existence and the art she creates.” Her work has been exhibited at Elan Fine Art, the Turtle Gallery, the Manhattan Graphics Center in New York City, and others. She has been an artist in residence in many states and taught extensively.
Her husband travels a lot, too. A visiting writer at many universities,
Kestenbaum has also served as a juror and panelist at the Smithsonian Craft Show, the Philadelphia Museum of Arts Craft Show, and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. He continues to publish poetry in many journals, including The Sun and the Beloit Poetry Journal, adding to the significant body of work collected in his three books, Pilgrimage, House of Thanksgiving, and Prayers and Run-on Sentences.
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For almost 20 years, Kestenbaum has been the director of Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, where the two make their home. They recently purchased and renovated a large Victorian, once an inn, on Route 15 in the village, only doors from Haystack’s winter quarters. For the first time in life they can walk to work.
In recent years Webster and Kestenbaum have collaborated on significant projects integrating words and images. In 2004, 24 of their pieces were included in the Couples exhibition at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art. They are at work on a new collaboration. When they are not working in their own individual forms, collaborating on art projects, or enmeshed in the demanding, cyclical pace of Haystack, they may be found jamming—Webster on bass and Kestenbaum on electric guitar, with a high-energy, eclectic blues band.
What were your strongest artistic influences and memories as a child?
Kestenbaum: My father owned a gas station. Family lore is that the Depression stopped him from becoming a journalist. He was always careful with words, always did the New York Times crossword puzzle—
Webster: —while he listened to classical music—
Kestenbaum: —and watched the Yankees. [They both laugh.] I used to observe things, and I remember him saying, “That’s what writers do, they observe things.” When I was about 10, we were driving by Dutch Boy Paints on the Garden State Parkway and I said the air smelled like Vaseline. He said, “Write that down.”
Susan, what about you?
Webster: My parents were florists and I’d get into the ribbons and the pins, make doll kinds of objects. I was 9 or 10. Back then sales slips had carbon paper and I remember taking all the carbon paper out and drawing on it and seeing the transformation properties of that simple kind of gesture. It was magical just like the printmaking I do now. It’s magical, serious stuff that you can’t control. And I studied piano from the time I was about 7, most of the time with a painter who lived an exotic life. He was an enormous influence on me.
Where were you both at in your artistic careers when you met?
Kestenbaum: I was writing poetry and I was a potter, too, trying to combine words and clay. I was pretty literal, less fluid than I am now. But when I saw Susan’s work—she was doing figurative work then—I responded to the kind of imagery, the mythic quality. Actually, we responded to each other’s work.
Webster: We did. We may have been at the beginnings of our careers and still exploring, but we were both pretty established in our direction.
How does running an organization of the magnitude of Haystack impact your own work?
Kestenbaum: It’s pretty busy and when we’re in season I can’t create much. But being around that kind of creativity has inspired me to do more.
Webster: The whole world comes to you: New York City, India, Japan, Bangor, everywhere, with this purpose of discovery. I love the quality of conversation, the quality of inspiration, but I need to breathe. Stu has this wonderful way of taking in and not taking in.
Kestenbaum: If I were directing a place where the management of it were separate from the activity of it, then I think it would be a problem.
How do you work?
Webster: I go through periods of time gathering materials, considering the foundations of a piece. For the last four or five years, I’ve been working with leaf imagery. Once I’ve committed to a body of work, I go right into it.
Kestenbaum: In terms of our working styles, both of us are able to consider and process, to save up quite a bit, and then have a burst of productive creativity, which, now that I think of it, mirrors the Haystack rhythm.
Webster: And when you and I work together, that’s definitely so.
You’ve been collaborating on art projects for about 10 years now. How do you work out the thorny issues?
Kestenbaum: We’re pretty good when we’re working together. We hit a certain rhythm. If we were thinking about what exit to take to get out of Brooklyn, that might be thornier.
Webster: We did lay down some guidelines though. Definitely cooperation and listening to one another have been part of our process, and I’d have to say that I’m the person who had to work at listening more carefully.
Kestenbaum: First time I’ve heard that. [They both smile.]
Talk about the pieces you created for the Couples exhibition at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art.
Webster: When we decided to do this body of work, Stu was very clear that he wanted his words to be read—they weren’t intended to just be a graphic. When we figured out that this work was a shared response to a shared event and shared feeling, I knew I couldn’t complete the pieces. I had to leave space for Stu’s words to complete each one. That was a new way of working.
Kestenbaum: Susan would make the print, leaving a space for me to print the words [He uses rubber stamps to print
each letter], but I would decide the orientation.
Webster: Sometimes that was so jarring. Even though I knew it wasn’t mine to decide, I couldn’t help projecting
further to some kind of compositional resolution.
Kestenbaum: I know.
Webster: We’ve been together a long time and have families and lives, and work resonates with us. We know each other
so well.
Kestenbaum: There’s a quality that appeals to me that’s like improvisation. I don’t know whether you feel this way. What each one of us does is intended to support the other. Like music.
Webster: That’s true. And once we’ve started, we don’t try to influence each other.
Was there a theme to this series?
Kestenbaum: I don’t usually say this, but I’ll flip over all the cards here. My brother died in the World Trade Center. I didn’t want to name it because I didn’t want to trivialize it, like oh you should look at these because it’s about . . . because—
Webster: —it is and it isn’t.
Kestenbaum: Our sense of what loss could be seemed exponential then, and you realize you could stretch your arm out over here or here, and there’s loss. Loss is not unique. It happens every day to everybody.
With both of you, a sense of place seems to bleed through all of your work. Is that conscious?
Kestenbaum: It’s not conscious, but place anchors me.
Webster: I’m attracted to imagery that has a sense of place.
Kestenbaum: And place is very much about this place, Deer Isle, the light, the austerity, the community.
Webster: And it’s also about relationships. We have an artistic relationship, an emotional one, a working one, a geographical one, a familial one.
In order to make all that work, are there boundaries you’ve established that you won’t cross?
Kestenbaum: I’d think the line would be when you want somebody to make what you want them to make.
Webster: Or be what you want them to be.
