From Haiku to Haibun to Prose: Fellowship of Australian Writers, Port Macquarie-Hastings Branch

      Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life.

—Stephen King On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

From back L to R
Tom, Hazel, Brian, Colleen, Ann, Debbie, Michael
Gwen, Rae, Wilma

Still bruised early Saturday I headed to the Mac Adams Centre at Port Macquarie to run a workshop organised by Colleen Parker. Each workshop is a thrill as one gets to know those attending. Participants ranged from a 'new' writer to Gwen, a delightful woman who was a foundation member of the group thirty-seven years ago. We focussed on 'writing from the senses' designed to envelop the reader in the writer's experience of the world. Using examples of Haiku from Basho to Les Murray, we explored the traditional form of Haiku then moved to Haibun—prose interspersed with an odd number of Haiku. 

Just two hours after

Eternal Life pills came out

Someone took thirty

—Les Murray

We had a productive day, plenty of writing, sharing work and laughter but also the odd tear. I was exceptionally moved by 'aha' moments from prose poetry that resulted from an exercise adapted from Graeme Kinross-Smith's book Writer. 

Judges 
Bruce Venables and Judy Nunn 

Colleen and I first met in 2001 at a meeting of the Partners in Crime group at the Hughenden Hotel. I was in shock after winning the 'Queen of Crime' award—Colleen and Diane Pattinson were to be the publishers of the resulting anthology. The story 'Morning News' had been originally shortlisted in the Stephen King   On Writing competition. 



It was then I realised life story could be adapted to any genre of writing. The work was 95% autobiographical—at the time there had been trials relating to a number of horrific crimes in the area including the murder of Frank Arkell, former Lord Mayor of Wollongong. The narrator in the story is a woman who has become paranoid because real life is frightening her more than Stephen King's fiction.

Diane Pattinson, Rae, and Colleen 2001

Colleen and Rae 2015

The grasshoppers' cry

Does not reveal how very

Soon they are to die

—Basho (17th century)

During the last week of school before exams, they had been reading and writing haiku in English class. Haiku was a Japanese form of poetry, brief, disciplined. A haiku, Mrs Douglas said, could be just seventeen syllables long—no more, no less. It usually concentrated on one clear image that was linked to one specific emotion: sadness, joy, nostalgia, happiness ... love. 

Ben had been utterly charmed by the concept. He enjoyed his English classes, although mild enjoyment was generally as far as it went. He could do the work, but generally there is nothing in it which gripped him. Yet there was something in the concept of haiku that fired his imagination. The idea made him feel happy ... Haiku was good poetry, Ben felt, because it was  structured poetry. There were no secret rules. Seventeen syllables, one image linked to one emotion, and you were out. Bingo. It was clean, it was utilitarian, it was entirely contained within and dependent on its own rules. He even liked the word itself, a slide of air broken as if along a dotted line by the 'k' sound at the very back of your mouth: haiku. 

Working carefully over a twenty minute period, with one break to go back and get more work-slips, striking out words that were too long, changing, deleting, Ben came up with this:

Your hair is winter fire

January embers

My heart burns there

—Stephen King It