NaHaiWriMo: Overview and Interview

The following overview of NaHaiWriMo and the accompanying interview were first published in Haijinx IV:1, March 2011, immediately after the first official month of NaHaiWriMo in February of 2011. The original Haijinx website is no longer available, but the overview text (not the interview) is available on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. The original issue of Haijinx also included “Selected NaHaiWriMo Haiku” by Michael Dylan Welch and “My NaHaiWriMo Experience” by Alan Summers (both no longer available, but some of the selected poems appear below). Interview answers originally written in mid March 2011. +

NaHaiWriMo: An Overview

by Aubrie Cox

Most people who have an interest in writing and access to the internet are aware that November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). The goal is simple: write 50,000 words in a month’s time. Every year countless writers take up the challenge, but some may tell you that 50,000 words is about 49,991 words too many. In order to encourage literary haiku writing and awareness, in late 2010, Michael Dylan Welch conceived the idea of National Haiku Writing Month (NaHaiWriMo). Unlike NaNoWriMo, which has a set number of words to be written by the end of the month, NaHaiWriMo challenges its participants to write one haiku a day for the month of February.

While NaNoWriMo has its own website to host the event, Welch used the popular social network Facebook as HQ for NaHaiWriMo activities. What was initially intended to be a page for updates, information, and the occasional sharing would overflow with haiku starting February 1st and see no sign of ebbing even half a month after the end of the challenge. With over 300 “likes,” the NaHaiWriMo page has become a place for poets to share and regularly flex their haiku muscles.

I hopped on the NaHaiWriMo bandwagon shortly after the creation of the Facebook page in October. We were still discussing through message boards how NaHaiWriMo was going to operate, whether participants should be challenged to just write 28 haiku or write once a day, or how poets were going to share work with one another. Ambiguities aside, I was just eager to participate in the upcoming challenge. Like a number of other poets, I took part in the first International Small Stone Writing Month in January as a warm up for February, and to help me settle into a daily writing habit. I honestly expected to only get two or three decent haiku out of the month, but what mattered more was the experience.

Then February came and a snow storm hit the majority of North America, which, I feel, helped set the tone and fostered the activity on Facebook for the rest of the month. Most of the snowed in participating poets, including myself, were content to stay indoors, generate, and share poems. Originally, I hadn’t intended to post my own poems outside my personal blog, but I easily became caught up in the spirit of sharing that surged on Facebook. After all, what are haiku for if not for sharing? This encouraged me not only to write haiku every day, but to write good haiku — I wanted to be able to share haiku that I wasn’t embarrassed to show my fellow writers. And if I couldn’t write a good haiku on some days, I wanted to at least do my best to write something worth editing.

As a result, I didn’t just write one, but multiple haiku a day. This, too, was fostered by the snow storm, when I had no excuse to do anything but curl up on the couch with my journal and write to my heart’s content. I would do haiku sprints to see how many variations I could write within a certain time frame, which came in handy on days I honestly didn’t feel like writing anything or didn’t know what to write. It also made me revise poems that would have otherwise been discarded and never brought to their full potential. Those first two weeks were invigorating; I basked in haiku bliss and the rush of generating work I actually liked. Either due to my over-enthusiasm, or the growing demands of school, I began to feel a little winded by the third week. Nevertheless, I made it through, and although I posted 28 haiku, in total, I ended up writing probably three times that. Logging in to Facebook to see my newsfeed flooded with poems on a daily basis inspired me to keep writing.

While the main goal of challenges such as NaNoWriMo or NaHaiWriMo is to practice writing, participants also cherish the social interaction The haiku community is already close-knit and active on Facebook, but the NaHaiWriMo challenge brought everyone together as a group rather than private exchanges between individuals. Since the community’s members are scattered across the globe, poets typically only get the chance to gather in large groups such as this once a year at most (or every other year for conferences such as Haiku North America). Through Facebook poets of all skill levels used NaHaiWriMo as a networking experience as well as writing experience.

When discussing the atmosphere with others, particularly fledgling poets, they all used words such as “nurturing,” “supportive,” “friendly,” and even “educational.” By following the discussion boards and prompts for discussion, they learned about craft and different styles and approaches to haiku. In short, the community became more publicly active on Facebook, and raised awareness, just as Welch hoped that it would. Wayne Chou, a friend of mine who has been writing haiku here and there for the last couple years but only now daring to venture out into the community commented, saying that the lively poets and their enthusiasm, “fostered a great arena for nurturing newbies like myself, and a great new venue for the art form to flourish and be shared” (Chou). Because of this environment and the welcoming nature of the poets, he felt encouraged to not only write better haiku, but to begin writing outside his comfort zone and explore the intricacies of haiku. Wayne was not the only one to feel as though he was pushing himself outside his comfort zone (in a good way).

The primary NaHaiWriMo activity took place on Facebook, but haiku leaked out onto Twitter and blogs across cyberspace. For example, Melissa Allen, who has been posting a haiku a day on her blog Red Dragonfly since May 2010, wasn’t sure at first if she really wanted to participate since she had already writes daily. Instead, she used NaHaiWriMo as an opportunity to experiment with one-line haiku, which she posted daily on Twitter. She says that while it was difficult to be experimental and sharing those poems, she enjoyed giving herself, “permission to write something far-out and weird every day, and exploring some topics and techniques that were not only new to me but that frankly I’d never seen explored anywhere else in haiku” (Allen). As a result, she found that she too wanted to continue to “push the envelope” more with her haiku. Allen finds this difficult to do in the public sphere, but notes that she appreciates the honest response from her blog’s regular followers.

The most popular way poets responded to each other’s poems was through Facebook’s Like button. While this does not tell the poet how much someone liked the haiku or why, most people I asked about it liked the option. Of course, they also expressed that comments are even better, especially when they include constructive feedback. Wayne observed that, “It was an easy way for other poets to give me a nod for the work that I presented. It’s also a great way to for me to return the favor.” Personally, I can also see how this would be a helpful alternative for those who simply cannot think fo anything to say other than, “I like it.” Since these sort of comments are among my least favorite due to their unhelpful nature, I would rather have someone hit the Like button.

If trying to judge whether or not a haiku has artistic value, it’s probably better to look at who is liking the poem rather than how many. However, while the number of “likes” does not necessarily reflect the artistic quality of a haiku, I’m reminded of kukai tradition (Welch also mentions this in the interview below) as I learned it through classes with Randy Brooks. A haiku is not actually “born” until someone says he or she likes it. In that sense, so many haiku in February found their readers and were born—we had a haiku boom! That, to me, makes the Like button all the more likable. Even if some of my poems never gets published (either due to rejection or policies of previous appearances on the internet), I will know there is a group of people somewhere in the world that like it. So I tip my hat to all the haiku midwives who clicked, and continue to click, the Like button.

Outside Facebook, it’s difficult to judge just how many people followed along at home in their own notebooks and journals. I was fortunate enough to have two friends who I had roped in at the beginning of the month. One, an Archaeology undergraduate student in the UK, used NaHaiWriMo as a therapeutic creative outlet, all of which she said had been pushed to the wayside since starting university. On her own, she branched out to new subjects and styles, and felt that her work improved by the end of the month. She is even planning on creating haiku-related challenges for herself after completing her dissertation. Meanwhile another friend in Canada used haiku as a way of recording her travels as she went to interviews from one end of the country to the other. While she struggled with the condensed form, having never written haiku before, she says, “It helps me remember the places I’ve been much better,” and learned that: “More is not better—and catch the moment while you can” (C. J. Chou). Although both of these individuals wrote in isolation and are relatively new to the form, they were able to reap the benefits of the daily haiku regiment, and both said that they would consider participating in NaHaiWriMo again.

As for me personally, I was able to walk away with more confidence in my own writing. I reinforced my daily writing habits and developed writing exercises that have worked better than anything else I have tried in the past. The focus on my writing helped me get through an agonizing month of waiting for news on graduate school applications. I wrote good haiku; I wrote a lot of bad haiku; I had fun writing both. I became more connected in the community, and invited others into it. I introduced haiku to friends and could only beam when they came to understand why I work so diligently at it. It was a good month.

Of course, I’ve only scratched the surface of what happened and discussion had during NaHaiWriMo. To read through more responses and to see the currently daily prompts, be sure to check the NaHaiWriMo’s page, which is accessible even if you do no have a Facebook account. Thank you, everyone, who took the time to answer my questions, especially Michael Dylan Welch, who was kind enough to provide some insight on his perspective of NaHaiWriMo in the interview that proceeds this article. Thank you to all the friends made throughout the month, and more importantly, thank you for the continual friendships and the wonderful poems shared.

An Interview about NaHaiWriMo

interview of Michael Dylan Welch by Aubrie Cox

Why February?

NaHaiWriMo was inspired, of course, by NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, a wonderful event that takes place in November each year. It’s way beyond “national,” though, and has become a global phenomenon, with more than 200,000 people participating in 2010, writing nearly 2.9 billion words (see statistics). And I was one of the participants. And I even managed to finish my novel, despite being unable to write for a week while running Haiku Northwest’s third annual Seabeck Haiku Getaway. In anticipation of starting my own NaNoWriMo experience, in late October I thought that there ought to be a National Haiku Writing Month. November was already pinned to writing novels, so I needed another month, and February seemed the most obvious choice—the shortest month for the shortest genre of poetry. I decided to create a Facebook page for it, and sent initial invitations to a few hundred people. A few months later, on January 8, 2011, I created a website for NaHaiWriMo.

Tell me about the logo.

For some time (long before NaHaiWriMo) I had thought it would be fun to create a “No 5-7-5” graphic—the text “5-7-5” with a red slash in a circle on top of it. I used this as a logo because I wanted the NaHaiWriMo site to have at least some educational value, too, as well as inspirational, and I think the discussions it produced helped to educate a number of people into rethinking their presumptions about haiku. Too many people learn haiku (in English) merely as a 5-7-5-syllable poem, have no idea why 17 syllables is actually much longer than the 17 sounds they count in Japanese haiku, and, worse yet, have no idea about the other techniques used in haiku, several of which are more important than form. I had no idea how many people might participate in NaHaiWriMo, but at the very least I hoped a few of them might learn something new about haiku. I recall that two people objected to the logo when the Facebook page first appeared, and I offered an alternative image (“I [heart] haiku” with “haiku” presented in Japanese characters, which I’ve since had made into a T-shirt for myself), but the responses I got to the new image were that people vastly preferred the original image. I suppose it’s somewhat provocative, but perhaps that’s useful to prod people out of their misperceptions of haiku. The irony is that, so long as the poem hits other necessary targets for haiku, there’s nothing all that wrong with 5-7-5 itself, even in English. In fact, here’s one of mine:

tulip festival—

the colours of all the cars

in the parking lot

But too many people think 5-7-5 is the only target, pay little or no attention to the other necessities, and they pad or chop their syntax to force the poem into that form, creating far more problems, without even realizing that they’re aiming at an unnecessary target (at least in English). To explain all of this, I wrote an essay, “Why ‘No 5-7-5,’” which I put on the website (it’s been getting a steady number of hits). The logo may offend some people, but it might very well be the people who are offended who need to hear its message. And perhaps, for those who like it, the message that they (and the logo) espouses makes them part of a club. They get it. Rather than exclude anyone, I hoped to include others, although they might have had to rethink their understandings of haiku to get it. I think a lot of people did.

Lots of people have been asking me to make the logo into a T-shirt, and I plan to do that before too long.

Why one haiku a day versus just writing 28? Even though there’s a recommended word count per day, in NaNoWriMo, the goal is simply to get to 50,000 words.

I’ve read in the past that it takes about three weeks to ingrain a new habit into your routine, so rather than dash off 28 haiku on the first or last day and think you’re done, I thought that making it a daily routine would be better. It helps you hone your awareness of daily life. Years ago, my camera was stolen out of my car. A year or so later, when I got a camera again, I noticed that I regained my habit of thinking in terms of the photographic frame—wondering how scenes in front of me might look as a photograph, whether now or later might provide the best light, or if the picture I saw in front of me might be better if I framed it from over there rather than here. I think haiku does the same thing, making you aware of seeing the world in a particular way, being more highly attuned to seasonal changes and all sorts of subtle and not-so-subtle experiences of ordinary life—and then inspiring you to transform that awareness into words. So the goal to write one haiku a day over the course of the month was deliberately intended to instill (or support) a habit in whoever participated—a haiku habit.

I’ve set myself the task of writing one haiku a day for an entire year several times in the past, so I know how hard it can be to sustain one haiku a day for a set period of time, yet one haiku a day seemed a challenging yet reachable goal. I managed to finish 53,000 words for my NaNoWriMo novel in November. It was much harder than I imagined, but I figured if I could do that (while not even being able to write for one of the month’s weeks), surely others could write a mere 28 haiku in February. Of course, it’s not just words but content that matters, which is why writing good haiku is a lot harder than some people think. I love what Roland Barthes once said in his book Empire of Signs: “Haiku has this rather fantasmagorical property: that we always suppose we ourselves can write such things easily.”

In early developmental/planning stages for NaHaiWriMo, you considered a number of hubs for the month. Why did you finally decide to keep the main page on Facebook?

I began only with a Facebook page, actually. The website was an afterthought, partly to promote the Facebook page, and also to provide more extensive content than was practical on the Facebook page. The website includes instructions for participating, my essay on the matter of form and 5-7-5, links to various haiku societies, and, for fun, a comments page (have you checked that out?). I didn’t really wonder (let alone predict) how the Facebook page might turn out, or what would happen, but it took on a life of its own and participation and enthusiasm spread by word of mouth. It greatly exceeded my expectations, by leaps and bounds. In fact, for the month of February, 2011, the NaHaiWriMo page received 64,516 individual views of all the various posts and comments. This includes repeat views, but it’s still a staggering number. I set the page to be openly viewable to the public (as opposed to being viewable just to people who “Liked” it or being a closed group), and the site averaged a monthly userbase of a little less than 500 people (including folks who regularly visited the site but didn’t happen to click the Like button, although most of them did). About two-thirds of participants were women, and the majority were age 45 and older, according to the site statistics that Facebook made available to me as site creator/administrator.

How do you feel about the Like button on Facebook in relation to sharing haiku during NaHaiWriMo?

Bless Facebook! I think the Like button was crucial, together with comments, to creating a sense of community on the NaHaiWriMo page (indeed, throughout all of Facebook). I was surprised that people wanted to share so many of their poems on the page. I’m glad they did. And when people could indicate which ones they liked, it created a sort of instant kukai (voting for favourite poems in the tradition of a Japanese haiku meeting). The comments that people often also added were gravy. Every once in a while I posted a discussion question on the main page (in addition to the Discussions section), and people weighed in on the various topics. This was a deliberate attempt to provide some possible educational value to the site, especially to folks new to haiku, and also an attempt to create some enthusiasm for the proceedings. I think the site would have done just fine on enthusiasm without these discussions, but it was good to have a mix of head and heart on the page. It’s one thing to write a haiku, so often done from one’s heart, but it’s also useful to be able to think about the poems and various issues involved in writing haiku, so you can improve your approach to the genre. Haiku needs both the head and the heart. But most importantly, sharing and reading haiku by hundreds of people, and clicking Like for favourite poems, really helped to create a supportive and enthusiastic community—certainly not something I had planned or anticipated. I think some poems got more Likes simple because of the time of day when they happened to appear, but generally a lot of good poems were posted daily, and the best ones did tend to get the most positive feedback, whether from Likes or from comments of appreciation.

You didn’t post any of your own poems during NaHaiWriMo. How did you feel about the poems you wrote by the end of the month? Would you be willing to share a few now?

I made a conscious choice not to post any of my poems to the NaHaiWriMo page. Just as I never published my own poems in my journal Tundra, I didn’t want the page to be a place merely to show off my own poems. That’s fine for personal Facebook pages or blogs, and even for some journals, but I wanted to point at the goal, to write haiku daily, and to point at everyone’s poetry, not just mine. I did end up posting one poem, on February 23, via a short webcam video posting, but that was all (I wish more people had posted videos of themselves reading their haiku, but that never happened—maybe next year?). Here’s the poem I posted by webcam, in response to the prompt of “bell”:

a trace of snow—

the cat’s bell

reminds me of you

As for other poems I wrote during the month, they were not really any different than ones I would have written anyway (I usually write about 650 haiku and senryu a year), except that I did try to write for as many of the prompts as I could. Here are a few selections (not always following the prompts):

your hand in mine

the sky so full

of stars

an urn in my lap—

the seaplane descends

from snow into rain

a delicate rain . . .

the photo of the body

passed from hand to hand

a little stone in my sole—

from which mountain trail

did it travel?

slanting rain—

the mall cellist

draws us in

a show of hands

in the jury room—

winter light

broken resolutions—

the snowman’s belly

drooping in the sun

dusty attic—

the old rocking horse

without any eyes

Valentine’s Day—

a cherry tomato

bursts in my mouth

unfinished basement—

it was here where I finished

my childhood

skinned knees—

my daughter asks me

about God

first snow—

a crow’s distant caw

carries me home

the plums in front

of the Egyptian embassy

not yet in bloom

That last poem recognized the revolution against the Mubarak government in Egypt that raged during February, and the poems by other poets frequently reflected the events of the day, whether a massive snowstorm that covered much of the eastern United States, Groundhog Day and Valentine’s Day, or other events like the devastating February 22 earthquake in New Zealand. The poems, in effect, became a sort of shared diary. I’ve written elsewhere how I believe vulnerability is vital to making haiku work (see “Seeing into the Heart: Vulnerability in Haiku”), and the poems posted to the NaHaiWriMo site, at least for me, helped to create a wonderful community exactly because they were vulnerable to some degree, a vulnerability that was self-confident enough for each poet to share his or her daily diary of haiku. We laughed and cried with each other all month long. Who knows how many wonderful poems were never posted to the site, too.

The NaHaiWriMo page wasn’t alone on Facebook, did you know? Jessica Tremblay, a fine bilingual haiku poet who lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, created “NaHaiWriMo en français” (in French). I was challenged to post a haiku in French, and shared this one on their Facebook page on February 1, such as it is:

je rends hommage

à Magritte

ceci n’est pas un poème

Speaking of Jessica, she also contributed a popular haiku comic to the NaHaiWriMo site each day, in her “Old Pond” comic series, focusing on NaHaiWriMo. The complete set also appears on her site [see also her NaHaiWriMo comics for February 2012, August 2012, February 2013, and February 2017, and also see her NaHaiWriMo Tips].

In addition, Andrew Shattuck McBride ran a NaHaiWriMo promotion on the Writer’s Digest online forum for Japanese-Style Short Form Poetry, and many poets created NaHaiWriMo blogs for their poems, or posted their NaHaiWriMo poems on their existing blogs. It was wonderful to see!

Did you yourself find a challenge in writing every day? How did this differ from your usual writing routine?

I’ve been trying to write a haiku daily for many years. I used to make myself catch up if I missed a few days, but stopped doing that because sometimes you have to live your life before you can write about it. The same is true for NaHaiWriMo, and I hope no one felt guilty if they missed a day. In my year-long writing habit, if I miss a few days, I usually catch up eventually, by accident if not design! So the daily habit of NaHaiWriMo was how I usually write haiku anyway, although I did try to give it special focus during February. What was different was providing the prompts and writing in response to many of them. I tried to keep nearly all of them objective, to promote the objective focus where I think the best haiku always start (subjective elements can be wonderful, especially in the hands of a skilled haiku poet, but usually only if at least some part of the poem is grounded in an objective image). Yes, some days it was a challenge to write, but that’s always been true, even if you do have a daily haiku habit. I also wrote a lot of my neon buddha poems during the month, too. They’re not necessarily haiku, but they were a vital part of my haiku habit during February.

What inspired you to start doing themes/prompts?

I originally had no intention of offering prompts at all, but on the very first day someone suggested that I do so, and so I thought, why not. I wish I could remember who suggested this, or possibly look it up on the page’s history, but displaying all the past postings is very time consuming, especially when there were so many. My first prompt was “hands.”

I believe all haiku are written from memory (even if that memory is very recent, like a few second ago)—or, as Wordsworth defined poetry, “powerful emotion recollected in tranquility.” I believe a good prompt can trigger a memory, and one can write a strong haiku as a result (it’s not the recency of a memory that matters, but its vibrancy). It’s also in the Japanese tradition to write haiku for a kukai in response to prompts (usually assigned season words), and also important to the renga and renku tradition in Japan to write spontaneously and responsively to previous verses. These are skills that I think all haiku poets can benefit from if they develop them, and I believe this skill extends to writing spontaneously in response to personal experience. You can kill the freshness of the inspiration if you rework the poem too much, or get too far (emotionally, not temporally) from the poem’s initial inspiration (or “triggering town,” as Richard Hugo called it), but I wanted the prompts to get people going. So I hoped the prompts would act as a catalyst for people, to supplement their own haiku habit for each day. I always considered each prompt to be optional. Poets could respond if they felt inspired, but no problem if they didn’t. It turns out that many people did follow the prompts, and expressed appreciation for them. A happy accident—certainly nothing I had planned!

What do you hope people got out of this experience?

One especially rewarding outcome of the NaHaiWriMo experience, and the community it created, was that people didn’t want it to stop when February ended. I asked Alan Summers if he would be willing to offer prompts through the month of March, and I was pleased when he agreed to take on that task, and I’d like to recruit new prompters for future months, too, as long as interest continues. According to the Facebook statistics, participation dropped off a little bit in March, but only a little. A surprising result, though, has been that the number of Likes for the site steadily increased, even in March, despite the fact that a few people didn’t continue their active participation. The prompts continue to be helpful, I think, in engaging the community that developed. I tried to extend this community by encouraging people to join the Haiku Society of America or other organizations, check out the discussion forum at the Haiku Foundation site, enter contests, subscribe to journals, and more. I hope some people have taken advantage of these opportunities to become more deeply involved. Haiku is, after all, a wonderful community.

I can tell you one thing I particularly enjoyed, and that was connecting with dozens of new haiku writers around the world. For example, I had a nice email exchange with Annie Juhl, a haiku poet in Denmark who I discovered was a fan of kayaking. Although relatively new to haiku, she obviously had a knack for it, so it was pleasing to see her post her poems (even though English, I believe, is not her native language). She said she saw that a friend had Liked the NaHaiWriMo page, checked it out herself, and got hooked. I’m glad to have made a number of new Facebook friends as a result of NaHaiWriMo, and I’m sure I’m not alone in gaining that wonderful benefit. What’s more, it’s a community that stretches worldwide, even while most poems posted were in English (even though sometimes not the poet’s first language).

Many people commented on the page about the benefits they got out of NaHaiWriMo. I could quote dozens of different people, but I’ll select one comment from Daphne Purpus, who lives on Vashon Island, Washington (I hope she might get involved in the Haiku Northwest group, since we live not too far from each other—although this isn’t why I’m quoting her). On March 9, in a bit of a discussion about how people heard about NaHaiWriMo, Daphne wrote this (I’ve slightly edited this):

I’ve just started writing haiku (mid-January) and as part of that endeavor I googled haiku, found the main [NaHaiWriMo website] with great articles about haiku and learned about the February challenge (on 1/31 actually!), and so I thought what the heck. I’m enjoying this, I’m 65 yrs. old, never done anything like this before, working at building community, so why not be a bit brave and give it a try. Well, after my first post, I was hooked!

What do I like about the site? That’s easy. I like the open welcoming spirit that I find here. I love the diversity on every level. I am learning so much from reading all the great haiku and it is exciting to me to see what others do with the same prompt. I make sure I post my own [haiku] first, but then as I look through what others made of the same prompt I am amazed by the richness of the form itself, and I also am getting (I hope) a better feel for the genre. And of course, there are also the nonprompt-generated haiku that I love as well.

These comments warm me! And many other poets expressed similar thoughts, whether new to haiku or seasoned old hands. I never really imagined what others might get out of NaHaiWriMo, except perhaps to learn more about haiku and to gain the haiku habit, but the greatest benefit that surprised me was the community that evolved. It’s a particular pleasure, too, to see that it could surely survive and thrive without me!

One other comment I would make is that NaHaiWriMo has demonstrated to me the expressive power of social media. The worldwide connections it has fostered have been remarkable to me, and I’m very grateful for it. I believe various haiku organizations around the world could do more with Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and Twitter, because these and other social media outlets provide a tremendous way to connect and inspire people. They are great ways to attract a younger audience, and yet they are vital among older haiku poets too. NaHaiWriMo never came close to the viral popularity of some videos on YouTube (and I doubt it ever would), but it still demonstrates how social media can very quickly and powerfully build a superb community—even if by accident (as with NaHaiWriMo).

Whatever happened to make NaHaiWriMo work, I hope that happy accident happened because of a useful core idea. On February 27, I posted the following: “Ki no Tsurayuki’s preface of the first imperial waka anthology of 905, the Kokinshu, began by proclaiming that ‘Japanese poetry takes as its seed the human heart.’ In all our writing, especially in response to the prompts, I hope we can remember to write from the heart (kokoro, in Japanese).” My prompt for the very last day of NaHaiWriMo was to write something from the heart, as deeply as possible. That, really, is the soul of haiku—and, I hope, the soul of NaHaiWriMo.

Any changes you anticipate for next year’s NaHaiWriMo? (Assuming there’ll be another NaHaiWriMo.)

I certainly hope NaHaiWriMo will continue again next February. I would be thrilled if that were the case. I hope it might attract a much greater number of participants, too. It’s not the numbers that really matter to me, though, but that people might catch the haiku bug, and get into the haiku habit. I hope haiku could enrich their lives as much as it has mine. That enrichment comes not only from writing and reading the poems themselves, but from sharing them and reveling in the community. Haiku poets come from all walks of life, and it’s incredible to meet so many talented and diverse poets through a community like this. So I hope that NaHaiWriMo might grow next February (and in the months of engagement between now and then). But other than that, I hope nothing changes, because the way it is right now is very pleasing indeed. I hope others feel the same way, too.