Featured Writer: Marietta McGregor

First-person reflections on the art of writing haibun

I came late to Japanese short-form poetry, after retiring as a botanist and science writer. In 2012 I read a newspaper obituary of pioneer Australian haijin Janice Bostok. Highly revered in Japan, her work was almost unknown in her homeland, her books out of print and unobtainable. Captivated by these small poems, in 2015 I submitted several haiku to literary journals. Some were published. I seemed to be on the right track so kept on polishing my haiku. Yet I felt I needed more room to tell stories, something I’d always done. Haibun appealed because of their possibilities for tale-telling.

An enthusiast photographer, I’d had a travel photography article published in a national camera magazine. So for my first haibun it seemed logical to write about where I’d been and what I’d seen. This effort rebounded into my inbox, rejected as travelogue. Back to my writing desk. I read many haibun online and in journals such as Haibun Today, Modern Haiku, Frogpond, Prune Juice, contemporary haibun online (cho), and Presence. Some poems moved me, lingering long after reading. Some were funny, profound, or challenging. Or all three. Certain poets became favourites.

From all of my readings, I learned key lessons:

• Haibun that elicit an emotional response are not straightforward recaps of events, nor are they heavy-handed. The key is balance, to be detached without scrubbing out emotion altogether. Ken Jones advised poets to follow the haiku tradition of lightness – just as in haiku, “show, don’t tell” applies to haibun and tanka prose.
• Poetic devices, including metaphor, simile, allegory, allusion, assonance, rhythm, and repetition, can enrich story.
• Haibun need not follow hard and fast rules. They don’t need to be first-person narratives, or very short (ask the Master, Bash?), or written in the present tense only. Writing in the present tense creates action, but flashbacks and flash-forwards are useful too.
• If a protagonist is on a spiritual or physical journey, writing cinematically moves the story scene-by-scene along a narrative arc.
• Haiku are pivots—linking and shifting between scenes or defusing the intensity. A closing haiku may provide the dénouement, or it can shift away from the prose, opening up the ending.

I employ all of these lessons when writing my haibun. As for the topics I write about, they vary…

From Memory to Memoir

Writers often tunnel into their own pasts. I’m no exception. My earlier stories were about growing up in my island birth state of Tasmania, my father’s psychological damage from war, and our peripatetic existence, as in “There but for fortune” (below). I’ve also written about later events (such as in “Ghosting,” about a devastating accident), or about memories elicited by news items— a report of drownings on an outback farm led to my story about a childish escapade in “The Back Dam.”. In all cases with memoir, I aim for a detached tone. If I find too many “I” sentences intruding, a rewrite into the third person often provides distancing.

There but for fortune

Each time my father buys a lottery ticket he’s certain he’ll win. He always asks his number one sweetheart (me) to put some luck on it. My four-year-old self wants to make him happy. When he’s unemployed he slips into angry introspection, drinking and brooding about his awful desert war. So when he shows me his ticket I ball my small hand into a fist and dramatically open it, as if I’m showering the paper with diamonds plucked from mid-air. When Dad comes home disappointed yet again from the lottery office, I feel I’ve let him down. The same thing happens with the horse races, the gee-gees he calls them. On race days I give him a kiss for luck as he heads out the door. He never wins no matter how often he gambles, or how hard I wish.

did I only ever imagine you blue dragonfly

Not Travelogue

After my first mis-step, I gingerly dipped my toe back into haibun about my travels. “Odour of sanctity” is an example, a story with some historical background and a touch of gentle humour which hopefully involves a reader more than would be the case with a descriptive travel diary piece. Bob Lucky, David Cobb, and Ken Jones are inspirations. In Bob Lucky’s affectionate haibun “Running with the Yaks,” the poet evokes an exotic setting and peoples it with engaging fellow travellers he knows intimately. I’m in awe of the power of epic allusory haibun such as “Stallion’s Crag” by Ken Jones and “The Spring Journey to the Saxon Shore” by David Cobb, which roam across landscape, culture and time.

Odour of sanctity

In the cavernous Orient Express station hall, a whirling dervish twirls to rhythmic Sufi music. He dips and sways in the half-light, head on one shoulder, eyes shut, right hand pointed to the sky, left to earth. His flaring ankle-length tennure—a white skirt of heavy wool melton, weights sewn into the hem—and his long-sleeved jacket together are his ego’s shroud. His tall camel-hair hat is his ego’s tombstone. His spinning conveys the movement of earth, sun, tides, and the blood flowing under our skin. But unwashed thick cloth and young male armpits make for a powerful combination. In my dim corner his devotion reaches me in waves strong as faith. 

earthbound
the rose's essence
in its thorns

The Natural World

Much of my botany honours year was spent tramping to remote southwestern Tasmanian wilderness tarns with an auger to extract peat cores from sphagnum bogs. Fossil pollen deposited since the last glaciation yields clues to vegetational history. This experience and other encounters with nature help to inform my haibun. “First flowering,” for example, canters through billions of Earth years in a paragraph.

First flowering

Watersound surges through chasms as young rivers are born. Caves drip stone, channel magma, collapse in earthquakes. Layer upon layer of rock strata climb to storm-scoured heights. Canyon winds jump wild torrents, sliding on loose scree, cutting new inroads into cliffs. Clouds float above a mountain lake clear as amber. Cycad cones shed seeds like polished pebbles. A kauri’s resin traps a wasp in prehistory. Mosses set spores, meld into peat, are lost in time. All this until something completely new unfurls tiny petals by a stream in Liaoning, China. On a warm morning 130 million years ago, Archaefructus blooms for the first time.

faint mist
deep in a garden
songbirds begin

I’ve also written on environmental themes and protests, as in “Way of Lilies” and “Wintering Grounds” (which gained An (Cottage) Prizes in the Genjuan International Haibun Contests in 2018 and 2021, respectively).

In Response to Art

Ekphrastic haibun don’t make up a large body of my work. My haibun “Prey” responds to a sculpture in a Roman gallery I visited one late autumn morning 30 years ago. Gallery in restauro, cloaked like half of old Rome in scaffolding. Rickety boardwalk tottering to a side entrance. Upper painting galleries shut, deserted sculpture halls echoing my footfall. And just like that…

Prey

A silent chamber of Rome’s Galleria Borghese. A dynamic tableau. The lithe young man overtakes a startled girl at a flat-out run. His expression is avid, expectant. She flinches away but he’s determined. Clutches at her body with a predatory hand. Her appalled look. Her cry for her father. She’s changing now. Her lovely slender form melting. Unfamiliar sinuous shapes – fingers into leafy twigs, toes rootlets, breasts cloaked in bark. In glowing translucent carrara Gian Lorenzo Bernini catches the exact moment when Apollo thinks he has won. The horror on the river nymph Daphne’s delicate white face shouts out she knows her life in human form is over and she will henceforth be a tree.

a horned owl
mistimes its swoop
night-dark laurel

Darker Threads

In my haibun I’ve written of genocide and displacement—colonialism and the murder of First People were undercurrents in “What Hides Beneath.” (I grew up as a fourth-generation Tasmanian of English origins, and all I was told of the island’s Palawa people was the lie they were extinct.) Other haibun deal with cruelties inflicted by humans on humans, such as my photographic haibun “Souviens-toi,” about a WW2 Nazi massacre in rural France, and “Death poem”, which alludes to the Stolen Generations—the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children who, from the 1800s into the 1970s, were removed from their families by government decree and placed in institutions or with adoptive families.

Death poem

Imagine a young girl living in the shadow of a camp, at the margins, on the edge. She hides in the scrub, stretched out full-length on gum-leaves and ribbon bark, face pressed against red dirt, smelling sweetness. She is light and air, nothing and no-one’s, flitting through sun dapples like a coin-spotted quoll, unseen. Only old women know someone is there. One day different people come, with white faces. They see everything with their wide searching eyes. The old women say, run away, hide. One leaf stuck to a wet cheek, melting into the bush, she becomes bark.

through all this
only a reflection
of rain

Regardless of the topic, I’ve tried to follow those early lessons and find a proper flow and cadence, a clarity of expression, imagery, and structure. All contribute to stories that grip, that move the reader. And being moved by writing is to remember it.

Burn-off

willy-willy
the every-which-way
of a cockatoo

A stewing windfall of a late summer afternoon settles into the valley. Paddock stubble shimmers. Leaves curl tighter underfoot and crackle sharply as if in pain. A red cattle dog whoofs out another shuddering sigh and wriggles deeper into a shady spot under the tank stand. The weather has been crazy — wild electrical storms, high winds, baking nights. If only it would rain, as is forecast every day. Inside the slab-walled farmhouse, someone turns on a radio, tunes it to the public broadcaster; a phone jangles in an empty hallway.

The glow to the west is bigger, brighter, edging skywards with an occasional flare which is at the same time beautiful, and apocalyptic. The light is dully brassy as the inside of an old school-band trumpet. It has been unnaturally still all morning. Now tricky little somersaults of wind sprinkle flecks of charred leaf like fresh-ground pepper into the heat, teasing here, nudging there. Eyes prickle and smart. Under the water tank, the dog sneezes. Voices come from the house, one a child’s, happy and light, the other a woman’s, grave and concerned, a sotto voce mutter, as if to reassure herself as much as the child: I’m sure they’ll be home soon.

third red light
a flurry of gum leaves
through the crossing

Birds have gone quiet, or have flown off. Even the resident corellas, which can usually be counted on at any time to flock together and screech out their banshee crankiness, are silent. The house cows are nose-to-tail tight under the big old pepper tree, although its flimsy willow droop gives scant shade. The telephone rings shrilly, again. She tells the child to wait on the verandah, and goes inside. It’s bad news. Spot fires have flared in a semicircle around the access road. His route in from town, and their route out, will be blocked inside half an hour. There’s a way, he says. Drive to Ten-Mile Creek, there’ll be someone there to ferry you across. Don’t worry, it’ll be OK. Her sweaty hair sticks to her cheek. Yes, she says, we’ll do that. We’ll bring the dog.

The sun’s Cyclopean eye has been growing bloodshot, until now it disappears altogether in a windswirl of black smoke. The sense of early nightfall is eerie, an earthly eclipse of the day. She quickly fills water bottles, turns off the electricity, grabs her daughter’s favourite worn velvet bilby toy. Collects the heaviest woollen garments and blankets she can find, soaks the blankets in water, bundles them into a plastic trash bag. The wind is stronger, the scent of a million sticks of ashy incense carried like a last-ditch offering to implacable summer gods.

wildfire
in the headlights
tree skeletons

She carries her burden outside, takes the child’s hand, and says, we’re going for a drive. We’ll take Cojo too. It’ll be fun. Child and dog in the truck, she opens the gate from the home paddock to the road. She’ll leave it open, thinking the cows will have an alternate route if they need it, that’s if they have the sense to take it. Switching on the truck’s lights as it is now three in the afternoon and almost pitch dark, she drives out, away from town. Towards the creek, to safety.

The child, clutching her precious bilby and with one arm around Cojo, is singing her car song, a wordless croon that rises and falls with the motor’s drone. The dog leans in to her, protectively, ears sharpened to her voice. The mother turns up the radio, and puts her foot down, keen to put some rapid distance between them and the juggernaut. The road this way is less travelled, so has not been graded for some time and the truck hops and sidles, skittish as a show pony. An announcer comes on the radio. News from the SES fire crews. The wind has eased. It’s starting to rain heavily in the catchment. She winds the window down to the blessed scent of petrichor, and begins to hum along with her daughter.

faint haze of rain
pockmarks pattern the dust
on the windscreen

Note: “Burn-off” is about Australia’s devastating Black Summer, the name given to the 2019-20 brushfire season in which hundreds of fires burnt throughout the summer. It won first place in the 2018 UHTS Samurai Haibun Contest.

Useful Links

The following essays have been helpful to me in my haibun writing:

“Characteristics of Haibun” by Ray Rasmussen, Haibun Today, Dec. 2007

“A Question of Form” by Jeffrey Woodward, Haibun Today, Dec. 2010

“Make Haibun New Through the Chinese Poetic Past” by Chen-ou Liu, contemporary haibun online 18.2

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About the Author

Marietta McGregor is a former science writer from Canberra, Australia. Her haiku, haibun, and haiga appear in international journals and anthologies and on Japanese television.

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