Memoirous

 At our last class Cheryl threw out the prompt: changing seasons Changing Season The light of late autumn slants across the sky before finally disappearing, leaving a hologram upon the deepening shadows. She walks to the river, breathes in the molting leaves and biting air. There on the bridge she waits . . . like tears falling fast she rues the coming of night sad to see day end Again, the changing season was a metaphor not just for this time and place but my mental space of late. I’m planning to read more Basho in 2025 and use his works to inspire a revision of a creative nonfiction project on bicycling the UK from top to bottom that a small independent press MIGHT be interested in. I had a nice phone conversation with an editor who was interested, but unable to commit to the project. I know, we’ll see how it all goes—it’s a Basho journey.

A play on the title “The Narrow Road to the Interior” by the Japanese poet master Basho, who created the haibun poetic form, which combines prose and haiku to create a prose poem. As someone who experiments in hybrid, the 2-night workshop on haibun led by Cheryl J. Fish out of the Art Basin in the Bronx appealed to me. I signed up, as it was remote. Haibun isn’t entirely new to me. When exploring the form tanka : https://memoirouswrite.blogspot.com/2019/08/juan-fujita-writer-of-tanka-and.html https://memoirouswrite.blogspot.com/2019/07/tankawaka-approaches-to-writing-flash.html The haibun starts as a sensory vignette, a bit of flash, prose poem. There can be a story arc, but does not rely heavily on plot. It is mostly there to set up the haiku attached at the end. Basho employed the art form in his travel writing to give more of a sense of a place, to evoke emotion, to help lead the reader into the exterior and interior. The minimalistic approach avoids the kind of purple writin...