This new book celebrates all things haibun – the form, craft and fun in writing and reading these small pieces of writing. Flash Frontier talks with the authors about how and why this book came about.
FF: Can you please tell us about your experience with this form – what it is about haibun that draws your interest?
Why Roberta Writes Haibun
I started writing haiku in the early ’90s when I was living in Tokyo. Sometimes, these haiku were too small for the story I wanted to tell. Living in Japan, I came across Bashō’s Narrow Road to the Deep North, adopted Bashō’s haibun form and made it my own. Most of my haibun are about relationships, real or imagined. Some pay homage to my past. Others expose a family secret. Many are a retelling with a different ending – Tell all the truth but tell it slant, as Emily Dickinson famously said.
One of my haibun is about my first boyfriend, who died before I could make amends for abruptly walking out of his life. In that haibun, ‘Threading Cobwebs on the Upper West Side’, I imagine a kind of reconciliation. One last chance to make things right.
For me, everything is grist for the haibun mill. At the end of the day, I write haibun for the people who view themselves as unseen and unheard. The person whose hurt is too big to carry. Or who was told no one will believe you. I want that person to know I see you; I hear you. You are not alone.
Why Lew Writes Haibun
I wrote my first haibun shortly after my first haiku were published. At least, what eventually appeared was a haibun. A friend had suggested I start journaling, and I soon had several pages of thoughts and safe memories. Each was a block of prose. One day, as I was re-reading my rant on ‘granite’ kitchen counters (granites are not black or green), a memory of my mother surfaced. She suffered from psoriasis, and her skin looked like pink granite. That image found its way into a haiku that seemed to leap from the prose.
This is one reason why I write haibun. To surface memories that are not ‘safe’. I have written of abuse, and of my mother’s suicide. I have confessed to things that I never would have admitted, even to myself. And I have been able to share thoughts on others that I have loved – my father, family, and friends who have died. In almost all these cases, the epiphany of a memory or experience has emerged through the haiku.
The other reason is one of joy, and again I turn to my journal entries. If I find a section that triggers an emotion, I do two things. First, I wait until sparks of thought begin to appear from the prose. If I’m lucky, one or more stand-alone haiku result. I then start to prune down the prose to the bare bones of a memory or thought. I want what’s left to show not tell, to hint not reveal. If there is to be a revelation, I want it to be in the haiku.
This is why I find haibun so much more powerful than prose or, dare I say it, prose poems. And I’m sure the joy I feel in writing is the reason why many of my anthologised haibun are tinged with humour. I love parody.
Why Rich Writes Haibun
I wrote my first true haiku in the mid ’80s – my longer poems kept getting shorter and shorter until, voilà. English-language haibun was still in its infancy, but it was slowly taking over more pages in the haiku journals. In 1994, I finally tried my first one, and found in it the best of both worlds: room to capture episodes in my life that, I felt, warranted a more complete recounting (my mother’s gradual loss of eyesight, experiences during my days working with autistic adults and children), and a haiku (or several) to draw out those moments that captured far more than I could ever say in prose.
I still write longer poems occasionally, and increasingly have been lured by the depth-charge impact of flash fiction. However, haibun still remains my go-to form – even if I sit down with the intent to write something else, a haibun finds a way to emerge. Part of this could simply be a decades-long love affair with haiku (my wife understands). But I think something else is at work here. A haiku opens up new possibilities: it allows different perspectives to infiltrate the narrative and infuses the observations of the prose. When asked by friends why I keep adding haiku to poor, defenceless paragraphs, I ask them to think about walking through the streets of their neighborhood – observing the buildings and the parks, noting the location of the local deli and pharmacy, identifying flowers in the neighbours’ gardens. Now think of the new perspective an aerial view would provide. You could comment on a specific street or compare sites that are blocks apart. That’s what the haiku allow.
FF: And how did the idea for this book, and your collaboration, come about?
This is a classic case of serendipity and convergence. During the pandemic, Roberta had been contacted by Jude Higgins, director of the independent press Ad Hoc Fiction, about creating a craft book about haibun (with plenty of writing prompts). Roberta liked the idea and proposed it be a collection of essays by herself and others, since she figured this would be a multi-person project. Roberta began organising an outline, but outside issues led to unexpected delays – and here’s where the serendipity and convergence come into play. In 2022, Lew had been considering doing a haibun book (for reasons stated later), unaware of Roberta’s agreement with Ad Hoc. He contacted both Rich and Roberta about joining as co-authors, and Roberta suggested this book become the craft book that Ad Hoc wanted. We all agreed, and Roberta wrote to Jude about the project’s new direction and co-authors. Ad Hoc typically doesn’t do collaborative craft books, but they took a leap of faith in this instance, and we’re very glad they did.
There were several reasons we all felt Haibun: A Writer’s Guide was important to do. First, we were frustrated with the way haibun was being taught, which was based on a very outmoded notion of the form as simply a ‘travelog’. Second, we wanted to share the wonder of the form – why it works, and how it continues to evolve in innovative ways. Third – and this is the core of the book – we wanted to show, by guidance and example, how to write great contemporary haibun. As was put in the proposal to Jude, “Texts abound on how to write and read haiku, in English and many other languages. Yet for haibun, there is no similar text. This despite the fact that haibun has been widely written in English for 40 years … there are several journals dedicated to haibun, and a large number of other journals in which it features. Moreover, haibun are now regularly appearing in mainline poetry journals.” This book was our attempt to fill this gap, correct misunderstandings, help others to better appreciate this form we love, and inspire them to write and experiment with their own haibun.
Extracts from Chapter 6:
Roberta Writes About Her Favorite Haibun (of her own)
Out of more than a hundred published haibun, my favorite is one I wrote about singer Janis Ian’s final album. It was published online in Poets Respond, an online feature of the poetry journal Rattle. I had long been a fan of Ian’s music. When I read an article in the New York Times about her final album, I knew I had a theme that I wanted to write about. I didn’t know it would evolve into a haibun until it was done.
Pinned above my desk is this quote from William Faulkner: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Writing this haibun took me back to things that happened to me decades ago. Some of those things were hard to face. The loss of a school friendship, family of origin turmoil, sibling rivalry, how scary the threat of violence is for a child, and how helpless that child can feel. The underlying motif of the haibun is something that runs through many of my writings: how the present is affected by one’s past.
In writing the haibun, I wrote the prose first, then the haiku, and finally the title. The prose almost wrote itself. It took a lot of tweaking to get it just right. The haiku follows my edict of being good enough to stand on its own. Unlike most of my haibun, the haiku continues the story. It also circles back to the first few words of the prose. Incidentally this haibun is a one-breath haibun – the prose and haiku form just one sentence. It is also a haibun about the power of creativity to make a circular leap from past to present and back again and again.
When I Read About Janis Ian I Am the Same Only Different
Smoking pot in the cafeteria with my friend Susan singing Society’s Child and I sing along our matching flower shirts like we’d stumbled into a field of buttercups and we’re staring at a sky of blue butterflies we don’t see the gum stuck under the table cause we’re stoned and the teachers don’t give a shit and I want to be Janis Ian strumming a guitar but today I have piano and when I get home Susan’s in the backyard crying and I sneak her into my room and her married brother bangs the front door screaming you tell my sister I’ll the beat the crap out of that guy if he ever shows up again and Susan and I hide out all afternoon playing Society’s Child on my big sister’s stereo careful the needle doesn’t scratch cause she’d kill me and when my sister beeps we take the steps two at a time and for once she’s nice and gives Susan a ride to her mom’s and the decades roll by and Susan and I lose track but I send her my book anyway and she calls and talks about the old days and I tell her Janis Ian says she’s done with music and writes haiku now and I am the same as I was that day in the cafeteria and different too which is hard to explain but after I find Susan’s address I pencil a paper with buttercups and three lines that say
rising from
the pebbled path
blue butterfly
I said earlier that the title was the hardest part to write. I wanted a title that would draw in the reader. I had in mind people who had grown up listening to the music of Janis Ian. I also wanted the haibun to appeal to those who had never heard of Janis Ian or listened to her music. I finally settled on the idea of a title that blends the concept of old and new, same and different.
‘When I Read About Janis Ian I Am the Same Only Different’ generated a lot of interest among the Janis Ian fan base on social media. One of the readers was musician/songwriter Janis Ian, who wrote me a kind note about my haibun.
Lew Writes About His Favorite Haibun (of his own)
I spent many years of my life burying the past, moving on constantly, never looking back. This was a consequence of childhood trauma, a set of experiences that had to remain buried. Writing haibun has been my salvation – it has allowed me, safely, to resurface some painful events.
Other parts of my life, of course, were wonderful. My time as a geologist was one, and I have written a number of haibun about my experiences with rocks. And that’s how the idea behind the haibun ‘Deposition’ began, an account of a remarkable paleontological find. It was first published in contemporary haibun online:
Deposition
“Help yourself,” the quarryman says. Steve saunters over to the dark layer, then motions for me to come. This is indeed what we’ve been looking for – the Sandwick Fish Bed, of Devonian age. The rock splits easily, and we find fragments of the armoured fish, Coccosteus, and an occasional fin. We note a sheen preserved on many split surfaces. This is primary current lineation, caused by the alignment of tiny mica flakes as water sloshed across the ancient lake bed. The sheen marks the orientation of the paleocurrent, but not its direction. Suddenly, I hear a yell – Steve has found something. There, in the middle of a large mica-sheened surface, lies a complete Osteolepis. The fossil fish appears perfect, though one scale is missing. Nine inches away, along the primary current lineation, we find it.
where she was found…
my mother’s head pointing
against the tide
I remember writing this haibun, thinking back to that glorious day of discovery in the Orkney Islands. As always happens after writing the prose, my mind started wandering to possibilities for a final haiku. Should I link to the fish, or the sheen? And what of the scale? These were my thoughts when, in a rush, an image from my mother’s suicide appeared. She jumped off a bridge, and her body was found on a beach some ten miles away. The haiku seemed to write itself. I was unable to stop it. I went through many iterations of the prose afterward, gradually cutting it down while trying to retain its unemotional, scientific feel.
I love this haibun for surfacing that terrible memory. Since then, through the small flood gate that opened, I’ve been able to write more about my mother. As for the title, the word ‘deposition’ can be seen as describing simply the process by which those rocks were laid down. Read again, in hindsight, it may also refer to a formal statement, such as that given to a coroner, perhaps in three lines of fourteen syllables.
Rich Writes About His Favorite Haibun (of his own)
Growing up, I had a first-hand view of the ravages that diabetes can have. My mother, a juvenile diabetic who took daily insulin injections (which I learned to give her when I was still a boy, much to my initial terror), had her first eye haemorrhage while pregnant with me. This haibun stems from the lessons she taught me.
Alignments
After she lost her sight, I visited every afternoon and read aloud the day’s news. She sat in her hickory rocker, her back to a picture window filled with sky. I sat facing her, the paper’s sections piling around me as I read through their abundance of bad news. In one day, two drivers exchanged angry words over a fender-bender, until one pulled a gun and shot the other dead; a rally for peace turned into a riot, as war and anti-war faced off; a son, during an argument over his fiancée, threw his seventy-year-old father down a flight of steps. Into the afternoon we sat, her face pointed toward mine. Yet her line of vision never quite hit the mark; usually she stared past my left ear, as if lost in a daydream. I’d ignore it, but now and then she would check herself: “Am I looking at you?” Quietly I would move my chair a few inches to the left, until our eyes aligned. “Yes,” I’d say, and continue reading, ever amazed at how such small adjustments could set things so right.
sundown…
reading to the blind woman
I enter her shadow
This haibun remains a favorite simply for being able to convey to others an early epiphany, and to honour my mother’s fortitude and resolve. The title ties in the idea of alignments both physical and emotional – a way of looking at the world that I still try to abide by today.
About the book
Haibun – the ancient Japanese form combining haiku and prose – has, over the past decades, been adopted and adapted by writers worldwide. Yet, despite its dynamic growth, much about the form remains misunderstood. In Haibun: A Writer’s Guide, three experienced editors and writers explore what goes into a good haibun and how its components (title, prose, haiku) connect to spark new insights and epiphanies. The authors also trace the history of English-language haibun, demonstrate the ways in which a haibun can resonate with readers, and illustrate how writers are pushing the boundaries of the form without losing its essence. With dozens of examples, resources, and writing prompts, Haibun: A Writer’s Guide will lead you to a new understanding and appreciation of this ever-evolving form.