I am an independent scholar, writer, and editor in the environmental humanities, with a special interest in people's personal experience of and relationship with the natural world. Since summer 2005 I have been creative consultant and editor of Sea Stories, an online journal of ocean memoir and poetry sponsored by the Blue Ocean Institute (www.seastories.org). During 2002-05, I worked as consultant and coeditor for the Maine Voices Project, a statewide public writing project cosponsored by The Wilderness Society and Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, which resulted in the anthology Maine Voices: A Celebration of the People of Maine and the Places They Love (2004). My academic background includes a Ph.D. from Harvard University with a focus on the history of American attitudes toward nature, and I have taught courses on environmental history, literature, and biography at Harvard and at the Cambridge (Mass.) Center for Adult Education. My book The Young John Muir: An Environmental Biography (University of Wisconsin Press, 1999) won the Modern Language Association's Prize for Independent Scholars, and in 2003 I received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to continue my studies of Muir and of environmental biography. Throughout my career, my intellectual and personal passion has been exploring the varied meanings of nature in people's lives, and helping my students and readers reflect on and express those meanings themselves.