Kaitlin Briggs Writing

Writing from the Borderlands

Studies in repressed history & the deep ecology of seeing

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Greetings

I live on the coast of Maine surrounded by the ocean and forests. This luscious, elemental setting cross-pollinates two passions: my love of writing and my love of the natural world.

My writing crosses borders, juxtaposes what appears incongruous, and pushes into new terrain. It thrives on tension—writing versus war, thesis versus rhizome, philosophers versus detectives—and traverses these oppositions, in the case of my current writing project, navigating the scientific and the literary, the human and the wild. I use an essayistic style, foregrounding my own subjectivity, to hold these disparate worlds together and integrate them.

I love not so much getting to the bottom of things as falling into their complexity and incorporating multiple perspectives, which is why I was an Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies in the University of Maine System for some twenty years—a specialist in honors writing and thesis research—because that field allowed me to do just that. After leaving the university, I taught in Ireland for three years, then trained in Field Dendrology at the University of New Hampshire.

In the Name of the Fir: A Cure for Tree Blindness

In the Name of the Fir: A Cure for Tree Blindness is my current project. It was accepted in 2024 for the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, where H is for Hawk author Helen Macdonald declared it “a jewel box of a book”—and it is now under contract with the University of Massachusetts Press.

There are over 3 trillion trees on Earth—about four hundred per human. We live among these giants but don’t really see them—a wall of green is all most of us see. Tree blindness is the term botanists developed to describe this affliction, and my book is the first to address it.

Learn more about In the Name of the Fir

“Behind me as I watch the waves in front of me, I feel the presence of those trees, their stature and stability, their aloofness and mystery.”

“An old-growth forest emits a profound quiet—and accompanying stillness—and to be inside such a place is to be enwrapped.”

“Each species has a signature. One antidote for tree blindness is to learn the distinctive characteristics that make a tree what it is.”

“To be inside an old-growth forest is to surrender to eternity, to time-travel in two directions: to before anyone we now know appeared on this earth; and to beyond our lives when all of us will be gone.”

In the Name of the Fir: A Cure for Tree Blindness

“Behind me as I watch the waves in front of me, I feel the presence of those trees, their stature and stability, their aloofness and mystery.”

“An old-growth forest emits a profound quiet—and accompanying stillness—and to be inside such a place is to be enwrapped.”

“Each species has a signature. One antidote for tree blindness is to learn the distinctive characteristics that make a tree what it is.”

“To be inside an old-growth forest is to surrender to eternity, to time-travel in two directions: to before anyone we now know appeared on this earth; and to beyond our lives when all of us will be gone.”

“In the forest I become someone else. I can think thoughts once inside that I can’t think anywhere else.”

“An old-growth forest is a place with its own beating heart, the sublime in breathing form, a living monument, a cathedral.”

“Like strange writing, a forest must be patiently absorbed, deciphered, re-entered.”