Lew Watts

The Art of Haibun Prose

Part 1: Approaching the Wild Haibun

Photo by khanh ngo on Unsplash

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Author’s Note: My thoughts on haibun prose are based on what works for me. They result from trial and error, as well as the generous advice of editors over the years. Many also come from my time as a haibun editor at Frogpond, where I have learned so much from interactions with those who submitted work. I am grateful to them all for helping to shape my aesthetics on what makes a “good haibun,” which can be summed as follows:

Haibun prose is brief, concise, and focused on concrete images—no word is wasted. It should be immediate in its impact. Something must happen in a haibun, and because of the haibun’s brevity, it must happen quickly—without giving everything away. A good haibun surfaces just enough of the story to engage the reader. By not saying too much, it gives space for the reader to fill in the blanks.¹

This ”haibun aesthetic” guides everything, from approach through the actual writing.

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For me, the creation of a haibun begins with the prose. Note, I didn’t say, “with writing the prose.” There is something essential before that—a period of contemplation on how to approach the subject. In other words, what decisions do you need to make before you put pen to paper?

Preparing to write a haibun is like stalking. You must be patient, circling the idea or experience many times, looking at it from different angles. Should it be confronted head-on or obliquely, truthfully or disguised? It can sometimes take me weeks (or as we’ll see, years) to figure out how to approach and enter a narrative, many times longer than the actual writing.

Entering the Haibun: Simple Narratives and In Media Res

Some experiences are so fascinating and vivid they can be written and read simply from start to finish. Many haibun being written today follow this clear, chronological arc. But remember— for a haibun to work, that experience must be of serious interest to the reader. Readers don’t need to be told that an experience was important, they want to feel its importance. How we convey that, as writers, is key—and no words are more important than the first ones.

So, it never hurts to open even the simplest narrative with a bang, something compelling enough to make the reader wonder what’s next—and then find out. My haibun “Obsession”² deals with a lifelong passion for gentlemen’s colognes. The prose opens with “’You smell of shit,’ the teacher tells me.”

Another key question before writing is how much of a backstory— if any—is needed before the main meat of the narrative? Can you enter the narrative without a backstory, and what would that achieve?

These were the questions Evan Vandermeer and I discussed over a haibun he submitted to Frogpond. After discussion, we agreed that the first part of the narrative could be deleted in its entirety. This allowed the prose to open with a bang in the description of a poisonous spider.

“I’m nearly asleep when my wife calls to me from the hall bathroom, her voice tense. I rush over and find her standing by the toilet, frozen, pointing at a motionless, quarter-sized spider on the doorway floor between us. “I think it’s dead,” she says. 

“Neither of us were afraid of spiders, at least not theatrically so. Ours was a reasonable dislike, one mixed with reluctant gratitude for the arachnid’s business with flies. As first-time homeowners and new residents of Tennessee, however, we’ve revised that general dislike to a particular dread of one spider common to the region: the brown recluse. 

“Disturbingly, the The brown recluse is about the size of a quarter and looks absurdly ordinary given how poisonous it is. Its venom is necrotic, and bites can be fatal. Pest control advised us to shake out sheets and coat sleeves before use. They also told us that one of the spider’s telltale features is a dark, violin-shaped mark on its carapace. Then they defined carapace.”³

Another way to charge an opening with immediate intrigue is to start in the middle of the story, otherwise known as in media res. Take this simple account that I often use in workshops:

It is a Sunday. You wake up, get dressed, have a light breakfast, walk to the corner, get on a bus, and get off at a stop in the middle of nowhere. From there, you open a gate and cross a field of cornflowers until you reach the edge of a cliff, where you are now standing.

Who cares if it’s a Sunday? Or if you had breakfast, or took a bus? The most important thing is that you’re standing near the edge of cliff. And that’s how and where you should start. Of course, you could simply open with, “I am standing by the edge of a cliff.” That alone will cause the reader to immediately ask questions—like “How did he get there” and “Why is he there?” But what if you opened with something like, “The edge of the cliff is crumbling—I can feel it through my toes”? The reader now knows you are standing at the very edge of the cliff, possibly straddling it. And, that you have no shoes. Why?

Breaking (Through) and Entering: Problem Ideas and Narratives

Other experiences may be hard to convey in a simple, linear fashion, or even to convey at all if they are emotionally sensitive. I maintain an active list of such “problem” ideas that I visit regularly. For some, I have spent years trying to figure out how to enter the story—several ideas are still mildewing their lives away, waiting. My average time for working on an approach for such haibun is at least a month, significantly longer than needed for writing the first draft of the prose.

Such an experience was the Aberfan disaster of 1966, one of the most traumatic events in Welsh history. On October 21, after weeks of heavy rain, a large colliery spoil heap above Aberfan failed and slid down, covering part of the village, including the school. One hundred and sixteen children and twenty-eight adults were buried and killed under forty feet of black slurry.

I was 13 at the time, and the memory has haunted me ever since. When I decided to write about what happened and how it affected me, I spent over a year searching for the right approach. My initial attempts centered around a straight narrative of that day. Set in the past tense and in the third person, they seemed unemotional and bland, no more than news stories. I switched to first person and present tense, and though I was now writing “in the moment,” the results lacked any wider context of the effects of the tragedy. That led me to try writing about the disaster’s aftereffects on the village, and on me. I was back to writing as a journalist.

The breakthrough came in a conversation with friends in Chicago. Someone asked, “Do you remember where you were when you heard Kennedy had been shot?” Everyone old enough could, including me—yes, the news even reached Wales. And so, I began to think more about the phrase “Do you remember where you were?” What resulted was an idea to write “Aberfan”⁴ as a series of diary entries, from the 1960s leading up to the disaster. For each year, I chose an event where I could definitively say where I was when it happened; and I presented each as a single line monoku. For 1966, I could then expand the entry into how the disaster reached and affected me.

Aberfan

1961 garbled words from space my father back from the pub

1962 click of a stopwatch again last under the desk

1963 nicking a Beano from the newsstand JFK dead

1964 Beatles land in New York creeping downstairs

1965 early hours a phantom punch in the first round

1966
Rumors throughout the school. Older boys picked up at the gates by fathers. Classes cancelled. Walking home through silent streets. Our front door ajar. A note from Dad that he’s gone to help, back in a couple of days. Grabbing an apple. Cycling past the biscuit factory, into Roath, then Llanishen, heading for Merthyr. A puncture in the dark. A chill in the air. A police car taking me home. The helplessness. The fear. The dark.

surfacing my body picked clean by crows

I hope the emotional resonance I was seeking is conveyed in those three final sentence fragments and the monoku that ends the piece.

There are other ways to approach a difficult subject, or even to enhance the experience for the reader. Here are two.

1. The “Hermit Crab” Haibun

Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola, in Tell It Slant: Creating, Refining, and Publishing Creative Nonfiction (McGraw Hill, 2019),⁵ described how essayists sometimes borrowed or appropriated forms—to-do lists, field guides, recipes—to contain and protect “soft, exposed, and tender” subjects. They called such work “hermit crab essays,” and the analogy to a hermit crab’s shell is obvious.⁶

I applied this technique in my haibun “Blow Out.”⁷ It concerns a catastrophic accident that happened during drilling a well in Nigeria, where I was working for the oil company Shell. Seventeen men were killed, most trying to escape the flames. I was part of the local team that responded to the accident, and I co-led the subsequent enquiry. What I saw and learned had a profound effect on me. But unlike “Aberfan,” I found it difficult to surface, and certainly share, those memories that were still painful. When I tried to write about them, I became overwhelmed by emotion.

I eventually found a way to overcome this. In those days, communication between rigs and base took place via telex. The messages were factual, blunt, and emotionless. This was a form that I could use to simply describe the first report of the accident. Its subsequent effects on me would be hinted at in a simple, one-line haiku.

Blowout

Drilled into a shallow gas pocket. STOP. Lost control. STOP. One dead, seventeen missing. STOP. Body unidentifiable. STOP.

art therapy always the same blood moon

STOP.

One final comment. Telexes use the word “STOP” to separate factual statements. In this case, the repetition of that word seemed to me to come from within the telex itself, as increasingly panicked cries. The final “STOP,” after the haiku, is of a different kind, however. Its voice is mine.

2. Graphic Haibun

A graphic, or concrete, haibun can be a wonderful way to capture a complicated experience or story. By framing the text within a recognizable shape, the reader is immediately given a hint of context, even location, before any text is read. Mark Smith’s “Pining Ground”⁸ is an example. Set in the shape of a cross, it immediately conveyed a religious tone to what was a startling lament on the loss of a beloved brother. And the four arms of its shape allowed complex emotions to be presented.

I have used graphic haibun to capture subjects that are difficult from a traumatic or emotional point of view. They are a sort of hybrid between graphic and hermit crab, where the concrete shape provides the (hermit crab) shell to safely protect the painful narrative. One example is the haibun “Far, Far Away.”⁹

Over the last 10 to 15 years—in fact, since I started writing haibun—I have found myself able to surface and remember many things from my childhood that I had previously buried. It has made me realize that my coping mechanism had been to always look back on the past as if it had been one of joy and sunlight. In other words, to see the past through rose-tinted glasses. To try to write about that, I decided that I would create a haibun as a telescope made of concentric rings of text—when we look at a star, we’re seeing the past. The outer ring of my telescope would describe the (rose-tinted) memories as seen today, with the inner layers going further back to what really happened. The innermost ring would be the truth. But no matter how much I tried, I couldn’t bring myself to write the inner rings as truths. Instead, as a diversion, I chose to look at what haiku I could eventually use to end the piece, and that provided the breakthrough.

I decided to focus my haiku, and the telescope, on the most famous rose-colored star, Betelgeuse. A red supergiant in the constellation Orion (also known as “The Hunter”), it is easily found in Orion’s belt. Oh, and the word Betelgeuse comes from the Arabic word for a giant shoulder. I then had my three words—”hunt,” “belt,” and “shoulder”—that I could use within the inner rings of my telescope. What resulted was a portrayal of the trauma I was looking back on. I had used this graphic approach to almost mechanically come up with it—to convey it— while avoiding the emotion of exposing specifics.

a long time ago...
the light from Betelgeuse
rose-tinted

Once you have found a way to enter the haibun, there are still two final choices that can and should me made up-front before the actual writing begins: the persona and the perspective (or point of view).

Using a Persona

Persona is generally understood to be whoever (or whatever) is speaking or narrating a given work, and it is usually someone other than the author. But I would argue that any form of prose contains an element of persona, even the most impenetrable scientific treatise. If the reader can sense something about the writer through their words, then that part of their persona has been projected and received.

This is often referred to as the “implied author.” In its most obvious form, it is how your voice can be heard through the words, and it is independent of whether your prose is presented in first, second, or third person. Close your eyes and listen to a series of prose pieces read aloud. If you can guess at or even identify the author, then that is most likely through subject matter or the implied-author voice. The latter is particularly important in haibun prose since it gives the reader hints over why the experience was so important to the writer. Andrew Riutta, who lives and writes in the remote area of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, admits freely that writing haibun has played a huge role in his recovery from alcoholism.¹⁰ He is also a poet with an immediately recognizable voice, as in this perfect, short haibun.¹¹

Spring Sunshine

Jesus. I guess I never really noticed it before, but each drip of melted snow falling off the eaves practically digs its own grave in the thawed dirt. Not much hope in that.

multiverse theory...
somewhere else

maybe I still have her

You may, however, choose to approach your haibun by making your implied voice more explicit. Using the second-person perspective helps (see “Choosing a Perspective, or Point of View,” below), but for your (own) voice to be clearly heard and believed, the readers need to feel you are speaking directly to them—perhaps across a table, or next to an open fire. If you wish to do this, be yourself and write in the vernacular. Use compressions, local dialect, whatever it takes to allow the words to speak with your voice. Here is an example from my haibun “I Beg to Differ, Mme Piaf.”¹²

“Spat it out—said it was Wally’s gang. Jealous they were, what with me getting into the posh school. Anyways, Dad and his mates sorted their dads, one by one. Beat ‘em so bad they couldn’t wait to get home to their sons. Trouble is it wasn’t Wally, was it? Didn’t catch his name, but when I think of him I still taste blood.“

In fictional prose, the most obvious and usual persona is, of course, the assumed third-person. In terms of haibun prose, you could, for example, choose to write about visiting war graves in the voice, or persona, of a fallen hero; or in the smoker’s voice of the old school bully at a class reunion; or in the lilted accent of a spinster aunt who only spoke while baking. Ray Rasmussen, in his essay “Stylistic Inventiveness in Contemporary Haibun,”¹³ cites a haibun written by Carol Pearce-Worthington that’s in the voice of a mentally ill woman who, seemingly, is preparing to leave her residence. The narrator agonizes over what to take in a stream of consciousness that, as Rasmussen writes, “could be close to the workings of a mind that is no longer organized, that holds neither longterm memories nor an ability to think strategically”:

what to pack what to take along. that dark watering can? flower in a pot? smooth humpback rock? flowers painted on my shirt—I don’t have to bring them. the bus waits. not honking. I look around. know only what I see. pack in private. feelings gone. deciding. a rock seems unnecessary as does the flower and the watering can. what am I leaving. where am I going?¹⁴

But what if the persona is not a person. This is where things get interesting . . .

Adopting a non-human persona provides an opportunity to enliven the simplest narratives into something different and interesting. Recently, a poet friend mentioned writing a haibun based on what they had heard on the news. My reply was that if it was in the news, it wasn’t new. To make it new, my friend could perhaps instead find an object in the story and write the narrative from that perspective. Like as the final dog in a hot-dog eating contest, or a burnt-out LED on a stock market screen. I’m sure this approach isn’t for everyone, or for every experience, but it can make even an old story sound fresh.

There have also been numerous haibun written as birds, mammals, even flowers. Less usual are haibun written in the voice of inanimate objects. Ray Rasmussen’s essay (op cit) includes examples of such personas as a glass of alcohol speaking to an alcoholic,¹⁵ and the voice of a pair of pants speaking to its owner as a lost love.¹⁶ But by far the most wonderful example is the haibun “U-Boat,”¹⁷ by William M. Ramsey, written in the voice of a German submarine. Here it is, in all its glory.

U-Boat

I have found the afterlife. It is silt and torpid current where nights are only slightly darker than the days, where blue and yellow fish inspect these chambers, kissing my emptiness. I have grown very cold inside.

They assembled me with pride by the Baltic Sea. In 1942, across the Atlantic, I sank one tanker and three freighters. The elation was mechanical–the churn of pistons, the swiveling of periscope, the greased turning of gears and shaft. I went down with engines out in high seas, off North Carolina, the roiled waters choking quickly our shocked moans.

Enter now through this hatch. First adjust your buoyancy. Yes, bring light and line. Don’t snag your tank or hose on that bulkhead rip. Observe the vacancy of these bays and beds. Down this corridor, in the galley, plankton dine in silence. Come further, yes. In the navigation room, to your left, the maps and charts have vanished.8

See that spider crab with black and spindly legs. . . . It is my Führer.

Take my story with you, if you wish. Go now. Go live out your little life until your little death. Know that all is oceanic.

I have performed the striptease of ego, hate, and power.

Ascend with care. Not too fast. Don’t hold the breath. For it is in time, not out of it, that you must now progress.

fired

from torpedo tubes

sluggish fins

Again, this choice of persona is yours, and is something best decided before you start writing. As is our final tool in approaching the wild haibun, point of view.

Choosing a Perspective, or Point of View

The perspective from which the story is told is its point of view (POV). Since POV provides the filter of the story, it is one of the most important choices you, the writer, must make in approaching the narrative. Used best, it is your way of conveying who is narrating the story to whom, and the relationship between them. There are three types of POV:

• First person (the “I/me/we” perspective), where the narrator not only tells the story but is within the story.
• Second person (the “you” perspective), where the narrator addresses someone directly, whether the reader or someone in the story.
• Third person (the “he/she/they“ perspective), where the narrator is outside the story and relates the experience of a character.

As with many things, each has its pros and cons.

Many (if not the majority of) haibun today are written in the first person, from the perspective the writer. “I am in the archives of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum…” is how an early haibun I wrote started. I regularly see this form of opening in submissions to Frogpond, and my worry is that it’s becoming formulaic. But putting that aside, the first person POV is powerful, not least in its ability to create intimacy and immediacy by inviting the reader to share in the moment. Its main disadvantage is that it provides only one perspective and filter, a sense of bias if you will.

Third person, by contrast, expands the perspective, though at the expense of the personal since the narrator is outside the story. It is the most widely used POV in novels, particularly if combined with the past tense, and is therefore the most familiar to writers in general. It can be highly effective, but there are at least two risks for haibun writers. The first is reduced intimacy and increased emotional distance. And the second is “head-hopping,” where the story rapidly shifts among multiple persons or within one character. And that introduces a piece of advice—do not refer to more than one character as “he” or “she.” Keep your characters distinct, and your POV consistent.

Finally, there’s second person POV. This can be a powerful approach if it directly confronts the reader –“You, yes you! Are you listening?” The more common usage in fiction, however, is as an internal “you,” like sharing the thoughts of a protagonist. In the world of fiction, it is the least common POV, but when used it can be arresting. In fact, of the eleven haibun to win a Touchstone Award since its inception, five were written with second person POV. (Of the others, three were in first person and three in third.) But I’d like to highlight an additional use of second person that I learnt from my co-editor at Frogpond, Judson Evans.

It concerned a haibun I’d submitted to Frogpond, “Spatial Concept: Waiting,”¹⁸ that was inspired by the memory of a visit to the Tate Gallery in London. I remember being struck by the slashed bare canvas of the artist Lucio Fontana, and I decided to approach the haibun by creating a block of text that I could also slash. The past-tensed prose would talk of visiting the Tate with an old girlfriend with whom, in real life, I later lost touch. I also decided that I would use a third-person POV, referring to the girlfriend as “she.” This was a mistake. Judson must have realized this when he suggested I consider changing “she” to “you.” This had two effects. First, there was now more energy—it was no longer simply a story, but a direct address to this person. Second, with “you” being neutral, the reader was left to guess whether I was speaking to a male or female. It added a layer of mystery, which as you’ll recall is a key attribute of our desired haibun aesthetic.

To conclude, there is much work to be done on a haibun before you put pen to paper. Use the time wisely to guide your approach—how will you enter the story, using which persona, from what point of view? Whatever you choose, remember that what you write must provide a sense of why the experience was so important. In short, it always needs to contain you. Only then will the reader really care.

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Notes

1. Paraphrased from the book I wrote with Roberta Beary and Rich Youmans, Haibun: A Writer’s Guide (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2023), which we affectionally call HAWG.
2. “Obsession” first appeared in Modern Haiku 49.1 (2018).
3. “Nesting,” by Evan Vandermeer, originally appeared in Frogpond 46.1 (2022).
4. “Aberfan” first appeared in Presence 72 (2022).
5. Tell It Slant: Creating, Refining, and Publishing Creative Fiction, by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola (McGraw Hill, 2019).
6. See also “Haibun and the Hermit Crab” by Rich Youmans, in contemporary haibun online 16.2 (2020).
7. “Blow-out” first appeared in Modern Haiku 49.3 (2018).
8. “Pining Ground,” by Mark Smith, first appeared in Frogpond 36.1 (2013); it won Honorable Mention in the 2012 Haiku Society of America Haibun Contest.
9. “Far, Far Away” originally appeared in contemporary haibun online 19.3 (2023).
10. See “Featured Writer: Andrew Riutta” in contemporary haibun online 20.1 (2024).
11. “Spring Sunshine,” by Andrew Riutta, first appeared in contemporary haibun online 17.2 (2021).
12. “I Beg to Differ, Mme Piaf” originally appeared in Modern Haiku 50.2 (2019).
13. “Stylistic Inventiveness in Contemporary Haibun: The Work of Carol Pearce-Worthington and Patricia Rogers,” by Ray Rasmussen, in contemporary haibun online 8.1 (2012).
14. Excerpt from “Treecutter,” by Carol Pearce-Worthington, in contemporary haibun online 8.1 (2012).
15. “Seduced,” by Patricia N. Rodgers, appeared in contemporary haibun online 8.1 (2012).
16. “Betrayal,” by Brieanna Hall, appeared in Haibun Today 5.2 (2011).
17. “U-Boat,” by William M. Ramsey, originally appeared in contemporary haibun online 1.1 (2005).
18. “Spatial Concept: Waiting” first appeared in Frogpond 45.1 (2022). Thank you, Judson.

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About the Author

Lew Watts is haibun co-editor of Frogpond and author of two Snapshot Press books, Tick-Tock (2019) and Eira (2023), the latter of which won a 2024 Touchstone Award and an HSA Merit Book Award for Best Book of Haibun. He is also the co-author, with Roberta Beary and Rich Youmans, of Haibun: A Writer’s Guide (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2023).

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