Haiku Moment

The other day when I was walking along the rim of the Glenmore Reservoir, I had a haiku moment. It has been a long time since I’ve had that feeling when the boundary seems to disappear between me and the thing I’m observing.

A few years ago, I immersed myself in haiku. I’m not sure why. I hadn’t written haiku since junior high school; I don’t consider myself a poet. Frustrated with the overworked personal essays I was writing at the time, and stymied by a big project I couldn’t find my way into, haiku was fresh, manageable. Three lines, seventeen syllables. I could do that. Besides, as a rookie meditator, I was looking for ways to practice mindfulness.

I read books like How to Haiku. I discovered haibun, a form combining prose with haiku or tanka, its slightly longer, five-line, 31-syllable cousin. With a friend, I learned to write renga, an exchange of linked haiku. I even went on a gingko – a haiku nature walk – with a local collective of poets.

Most of my seventeen-syllable efforts were mediocre, but on a few occasions, I hit the haiku sweet spot: a sensual experience captured in the present moment, connected to nature, and rendered with simplicity.

My haiku cleanse lasted about a year. Even as I found my way back into the high-calorie writing of essays, I noticed my prose was leaner, tighter. I paid a new kind of attention to those luminous places where the words and ideas click.

As always, in this part of the world, spring has been slow to start. On top of that, it’s been a particularly rough week. Boston; West, Texas; a friend facing cancer.

Outside my window, the wind whips the bare branches of the weeping birch, sets the chimes into a frenzy. The sky, grey again, promises more snow. Walking the other day, the sun was shining, the air felt warm and still. I pulled myself away from thinking and scanned the frozen, mottled surface of the reservoir for the swans that swoop in every spring. Basho, the 17th century haiku master saw the cherry tree as a sign of spring. In Calgary, we have swans. Tall, noble birds strutting on the snow.

        five swans

        on open water –

        ice blossoms

Photo of Glenmore Reservoir by Kevin Saff via Wikimedia Commons

Shortlisted!

Exciting news! My essay “Skin Deep” has been shortlisted for the 2013 Alberta Literary Awards James H. Gray prize for short non-fiction. It’s a thrill and an honour to have my piece listed alongside work by the peripatetic Marcello di Cintio and the writer/rapper Omar Mouallem.

My essay – an early version of the first chapter of my nonfiction manuscript, Under the Skin – was published in FreeFall magazine (Fall 2012). You can read “Skin Deep” here.

If you happen to be in Calgary on April 23, join me and other short-listed Calgary authors for a reading at 7 p.m. at the Rose & Crown (1503 – 4th Street SW). 

My Good Teacher

“A good teacher,” Molly Peacock writes in her book The Paper Garden: Mrs Delaney Begins Her Life’s Work at 72, “urges you beyond your childish perfectionism.”

I have just spent five years working with a good teacher. I first met Merilyn Simonds online, when I signed up for her four-month course, Writing From Life, at UBC’s Booming Ground. The first pages I sent – an essay I’d been writing off and on for a couple of years – had been polished so much, I’d worn the finish off.

“I sense a holding back,” Merilyn told me gently after she read that first piece.

At the end of the course, I had rough drafts of several new stories and a sense that together they might just be a book. I had barely begun. Merilyn agreed to continue in a mentorship role. She combed through draft after draft, and later, responded to my weekly updates. She coached me on writing scenes and building tension. She encouraged me to attend to pacing and chart dramatic arcs. She pointed me to a rich reading list of personal nonfiction. Through it all, she urged me beyond the perfectionism I’d clung to since I was a child.

Stay open. Trust your gut. Move quickly.

Don’t think too much. Engage your sensual self. Enjoy the ride.  

Learning a skill, Molly Peacock suggests, involves an attention that moves an artist “beyond the self to the focused-on thing. All else drops away.”

This is what happened to me in my time with Merilyn. I rooted out the arch, persistent, know-it-all narrator who was always sneaking in and taking over. I sensed my story develop muscles and a pulse of its own. I learned how to let go of myself and surrender to the thing I was making.

A few weeks ago, Merilyn read the fifth draft of my manuscript. “Yes it is a book. And yes it is finished,” she wrote. “The tightness is gone.”  

After five years, I am going forward without my teacher. But oh, I have been taught well.

Over lunch a few months ago, Merilyn answered my questions about getting the manuscript out to publishers. As usual, she had several suggestions, but lately, I keep returning to this one.

“Get busy with the next thing.”

Yes, ma’am. And thank you.

Going Public

I don’t know how or when I first heard about Lisa Romeo, a New Jersey-based nonfiction writer, and an inventive, generous writing teacher and coach. But for the past few years, Lisa’s blog has been part of my morning warm-up. Her regular Friday Fridge Clean-Out is a weekly trove of writing treasures I try not to miss.

Today, I’m thrilled that one of my essays appears as a guest post on Lisa Romeo Writes.

Thanks for checking it out.