I’m so pleased to announce the publication of the latest full-length collection of essays and artworks by Dr. Kendall Johnson, Writing for Vision: Voicing the New Wild.

Cover art: Red Moon Rising (2018) copyrighted © by Kendall Johnson

138 pages
ISBN: 979-8-3493-5937-8
Release Date: 22 August 2025

Available through Amazon and other booksellers

This book is the companion volume to Dr. Johnson’s earlier collection of essays, poetry, and artworks, Writing to Heal: Self-Care for Creators (May 2024).

Writing for Vision features 24 visual artworks and seven essays which were first published (some with additional artworks) in MacQueen’s Quinterly online:

• Part I: “Interior Lighting: Abstraction and the Concrete” (Issue 23, April 2024)
  
  
• Part II: “Grounding: What Land Art Tells Us of the Long Walk Home” (Issue 24, August 2024)
  
  
• Part III: “Seeing Beyond the Clamorous Now” (Issue 25, September 2024)
  
  
• Part IV: “Fields of Vision” (Issue 26, January 2025)
  
  
• Part V: “Losing Light” (Issue 26, January 2025)
  
  
• Part VI: “Slanting Light: Voicing the New Wild” (Issue 27, March 2025)
  
  
• Part VII: “Vision” (Issue 27, March 2025)
  
  

this brief moment
ten thousand stars
open your eyes

—Kendall Johnson
in More Fireflies (2022)

Introduction

It’s not easy to see in the dark. But following up on his previous work, Writing to Heal, Kendall Johnson gives us some insights into how artists and writers can navigate an increasingly dark world and, in the process, create light for the future.

Cultural fragmentation, political unrest, and unrelenting ecological threats are all closing in on us, intruding upon our individual spheres in rapid-fire succession and with an alarmingly repetitive insistence. Everything seems to be falling apart.

The promise, and it is an ironic one, that those who create can give the rest of us is that human beings working together are the best hope for restoring our own balance, for revealing truths that can ultimately guide us toward change, toward transformation, toward hope. The creative soul is, by its nature, continually exploring alternatives, continually stretching boundaries, continually reaching for transformation.

Artists, whether they are creating visual or written works, music or drama, understand struggle and despair better than most. But they also understand perseverance. They are propelled by a need to express and to relate, to face uncertainty, and to speak in a language which many will not understand. And yet they persist.

The central message of Writing for Vision is to remind those who are prone to despair that this is exactly the time when persistence in the arts, even if they are quiet efforts, is the best hope for the future. The best promise for seeing beyond the darkness.

—Kate Flannery
6 June 2025

Kate Flannery

is an Editor-at-Large for The Journal of Radical Wonder, where she writes the bi-weekly column “Interludes.” She is also a writer, lawyer, and musician who lives in a small college town. Her essays, poetry, and fiction have been published in Chiron Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Emerge, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Pure Slush, and Shark Reef. In 2022, she was a finalist for Bellingham Review’s Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction. She is co-author, with Kendall Johnson and John Brantingham, of Prayers for Morning: Twenty Quartets (MacQ, 25 December 2024).

Kate works regularly with the Sasse Museum in Pomona, California, contributing to exhibition catalogs for the museum as well as writing ekphrastic poetry in response to the artwork on display there. Her current projects are a curated volume about Palmer Canyon in the wake of the Grand Prix Fire of 2003 and a collection of reflections on the 2024 death of her brother: A Book of Michael—Presence, Absence, and Things In Between.

Bio: Kendall Johnson