May 05, 2014  
Haiku Society of America
 
 
MESSAGE FROM
THE PRESIDENT 

 

 

2014 Members' Anthology
Last Chance!


Dear HSA Members,
 
It's hard to believe we've already reached
Cinco de Mayo or, as I like to call it, 'Issa de Mayo' (so-named because Issa was born on the Fifth Day of Fifth Month, according to the old Japanese calendar). This means, if you've been procrastinating, you'd better get busy and submit your haiku for the members' anthology before the May 31st deadline! Here's the link: 
 
Please note that your copy of the anthology will be mailed to you free, as long as you're a member of HSA. If you've been putting off rejoining, here's where you can make that happen:
 

Haiku Holiday a Hit

Last month I was fortunate to be able to attend the Haiku Holiday conference, held in the historic Stone House on Bolin Brook Farm, Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I'm sure that you'll be hearing more about this wonderful, stimulating event in the next Ripples, but for now I'd simply like to thank Jean Earnhardt, our hostess, and the conference organizers Dave Russo and Lenard D. Moore. Lenard led a terrific haiku editing workshop, and John Stevenson inspired us to create haiku from our own and from other people's stories. I talked about my book-in-progress, "Issa and Animal Rights," which led into a session in which participants wrote haiku from the points of view of birds, snails, flies, and other critters. All in all, it was a great day, capped off nicely by a tasty dinner party hosted by Kate MacQueen.

I highly recommend Haiku Holiday: an intimate gathering of poets who love haiku and share that love all day long in an idyllic setting. You should think about attending in April 2015 (I am)!

Here are some pics snapped by Dave:



Mentoring

I'm happy to report that I've now matched 18 novice poets with experienced haiku mentors. In Chapel Hill, Dave Russo came up with a great, new idea: to create mutual mentoring partnerships that would bring together experienced poets to encourage each other in their writing. Sometimes an experienced poet falls into a slump, as far as haiku-composing goes (sound familiar?). A mentoring partnership of this type would add a little extra bit of encouragement and support to help motivate such poets to write more. The partners would decide between themselves how often to communicate and in what form (e-mail, phone, Skype), and they could set their writing goals and even, if they wanted to, create homework for each other. If you're a fairly experienced, published poet who would like to be matched with a peer for this kind of one-on-one haiku stimulation and sharing, let me know. And if you're a novice poet who'd like to become number 19 to be assigned a mentor, I'll be happy to make that happen. Mentoring is becoming a popular perk for HSA members; let's keep it going!

David G. Lanoue
HSA President
 

Ignatius Fay 
HSA Bulletin Editor
Haiku Society of America

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Membership in the Haiku Society of America includes a year's subscription to the society's journal, Frogpond (three issues yearly).  In addition, members receive the newsletter, Ripples (three issues yearly), the annual information sheet, and an annual address/email list of HSA members.

 


 

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