Kristen Lindquist

Two Favorite Haibun

On the Importance of Good Storytelling

Photo by Suzy Hazelwood on Unsplash

Editor’s note: This essay is part of a periodic series in which writers offer two favorite works—one of their own and one written by another author—as starting points to explore their creative approaches.

In a discussion about writing haibun, we can talk about prosody or structure or the essential interplay between title, prose, and haiku. We can talk about different forms and genres of haibun prose: memoir, essay, letter, prose poem, sci fi, fantasy, confessional, romance, interior monologue. We might even talk about different ways to use the haiku in a haibun. But when it comes right down to it, what most of us really want at heart is a good story told well.

We humans have likely shared stories since we could talk: fairy tales, myths and legends, ghost stories, stories about ourselves, our families and friends. Stories entertain and educate. They build and reinforce our connections as a community. They inspire and console. And not least, the act of sharing a story creates an intimate connection—a sacred space of sorts—between the storyteller and listener(s).

I’m a sucker for a good story and especially appreciate haibun that feature good story-telling. The brevity of the form encourages judicious use of plot elements and detail, so the narrative usually moves right along, to be enhanced or taken in new directions by the haiku, which often lies in wait amid the prose like an unexpected plot twist.

And I’m a sucker for ravens. As a birder, I always smile when I hear a raven’s unearthly voice in the forest or watch one soar overhead. I’ve long loved the myths—those ancient stories!— about Odin’s ravens Hugin (Thought) and Munin (Memory), who spied for him on the human world, and the ravens of Celtic and various Native American traditions. So when I was scrolling through my Facebook feed recently and a post from Chuck Brickley headed “Raven” caught my eye, I naturally paused to read it. This was the haibun he shared:

Raven

Chief Willard Wells, almost always drunk—often on vanilla extract—would knock on my log cabin door at any hour of the day or night. Sometimes he had a black garbage bag full of freshly netted salmon to sell for booze money. Other times he wanted a ride into town, or back out past the marsh and down to his shack by the Fraser River. On one of those latter occasions the Chief, riding shotgun in my ’54 Mercury truck, glanced at the stack of books between us on the seat.

“Books?” he exclaimed, running a hand through his black hair. “Books? The only book you need to read, son, is the Great Book of the Bush!” He said this with a sweep of his arm, indicating the marsh just off the road, and the Douglas fir-covered mountains rising straight up all around us in the late afternoon sunlight. Slowing down, I could see Mt. Hope looming over its reflection surrounded by cattails in the marsh. Its peak, still capped with snow, glowed amidst a cluster of shimmering white clouds.

I pulled to the side of the road and shut off the engine. Chief Will rolled down his window. I rolled down mine. A breeze filled the truck with the scent of black cottonwood buds. The Chief pulled out a brown-bagged bottle, took a swig, and passed it to me.

old growth forest
each call of the raven
deeper in

It was love at first read. The plot could not be more basic: a guy gives a friend a ride home. But so many elements of good storytelling are distilled into these three short paragraphs. There’s character development. There’s the skillful use of archetypes—the drunk friend as Fool/Trickster as well as Elder, who imparts unexpected wisdom along the narrator’s journey. The use of setting to shape the narrative. Humor and compassion. Some essential, albeit brief, dialogue. And resonance in every single detail—the garbage bag full of salmon, the mountain reflected in the marsh, that mountain’s ironic name—that make this story rich and particular. It feels real in a way that takes it way beyond the familiar white-guy-learns-something-from-native-guy story.

I also find myself intrigued by the story spaces created within the actual story. Just as the literal story is contained within the textual space of the haibun, Chief Wells and the narrator are held within the confines of the truck cab. In this close space, the Chief shares—along with/via his brown-bagged bottle—the story of “the Bush” as teacher. He thus brings the narrator into the larger story space of the natural world around them, a sensual world they can access together by simply rolling down (or looking through) the truck windows. The Chief ends up passing on to the narrator much more than a bottle of booze. In essence, this is a story as much about the value of storytelling as about a meaningful friendship. Or perhaps it’s about the value of storytelling to a meaningful friendship.

Yeah, the title repeats a key word used in the haiku, but I don’t mind that. This haibun is a gem, of which the haiku is an essential, shining facet, providing a tonal shift that moves us away from the truck and into the woods. Additionally, “old growth forest” lets us know that the landscape featured in the prose is a rare and venerable place, a repository of an ancient knowledge not found in books, but also vulnerable, perhaps threatened by logging/ignorance. And of course “the raven” refers to black-haired trickster Wells himself, its calls—his narrative—drawing the listener further along the path of a land-based, indigenous wisdom. What looks like a simple story on the surface, like a mountain reflected in a cattail marsh, has so much more going on underneath.

Brickley told me that he had initially been reluctant to write haibun: “For years I had no interest in mixing prose with haiku. If I were to ever try my hand at it, it would not only have to be akin in spirit to haiku (at least how I had come to view the form), it would have to be entertaining. I like a good story, and as anyone who knows me knows, I like to tell them.” Turns out “Raven” was the first haibun he ever wrote, and, except for a couple of small details, it’s a true story. He says he wrote it without at first realizing it was a haibun. Yet it feels natural and appropriate that this was the form in which his story chose to emerge. The interplay of images and meanings inherent in haibun elevates the prose in a way that appropriately honors a complicated friendship, and, of course, entertains the reader. But also, as all good stories do, it gives us something more, something that stays with us.

Here’s a true story of my own, that also let itself be told in the form of a haibun, about a man who complicated my life:

The last time we spoke

you called to make amends. Back then you didn’t have a phone, but you called me from pay phones all over the city. You called me all the time. I was at your mercy. You called me one night just before midnight to tell me, “So I’m talking to Kim about the divorce papers on the phone outside 7-11 tonight, and I’m wearing my Tigger t-shirt, and this girl walks by and says, ‘Hey, I like Tigger too,’ and flips up her skirt to show me a Tigger tattoo on her thigh. I followed her home just to find out where she got it.”

cigarette break
the long story
that goes with the scar

Another time, you called me from a bar on karaoke night. You told me, “There’s a little girl here in a princess dress, with princess slippers on. You should see this! She has a great voice.” I can hear the thump of music in the background, loud laughter. You asked, “Is your husband home?” You said, “I’m a patient man.”

longest night
a lighter's snap and spark
in a dark doorway

The “you” of my haibun was someone with whom I was in a long-distance relationship for a few months in my late 20s, when we were both trying to figure out what to do with our lives. I changed some details—I was not married at the time, for example, although I was living with someone—but the dialogue is real.

This story was meant to capture the mood of our relationship, as well as to honor a troubled soul with a messed-up life but a brilliant poetic mind. (We met at a writer’s conference.) Because he lived several states away, our relationship was primarily telephone based. This was before cell phones, and he couldn’t afford his own landline, so he’d call me whenever he found himself near a payphone. We’d have long, often disquieting conversations at all hours of the night. He smoked, he drank too much, he was in the middle of a divorce; his recklessness and flirtations with other women drove me crazy. But he had a romantic heart and found beautiful poetry in many of the things he observed or experienced. He told good stories, and I was drawn to that.

I originally wrote this as a longer, narrative poem that I never felt captured this relationship in quite the right way. So it sat in a drawer for decades. A few years ago, I learned that this man had passed away after a short bout with an aggressive cancer. Thinking of him, I revisited my original poem and decided to try and recast it as a haibun. It seemed a good way to pare it down and get at the story’s essential elements while retaining its poetry.

The poem’s title had been “Long Distance,” so I was thinking about all our phone calls. Then I remembered how one night, years after we’d parted ways, he had called me up out of the blue to apologize for his behavior then. I belatedly understood that this random phone call had been his way of making amends as part of the Alcoholics Anonymous recovery process—and also realized that it was the last time we had spoken. So I decided to put his redemption right up front in the haibun, starting with a new title that led right into the prose. Then I let his own words and the tonal moments of the haiku fill out and shape the story.

When I re-read my haibun now in light of my consideration of “Raven,” I see how a phone conversation creates its own story space as intimate as that created by a truck cab. The seductive communion of those strange, late-night conversations have entrapped the narrator in a relationship that she can’t seem to escape despite the fact that she and the “you” are separated by some physical distance. In this way, “The last time we spoke” is likewise a story about how storytelling can deepen a connection between two human beings, for better or worse.

And hopefully it’s also entertaining. As singer/songwriter Taylor Swift would probably attest, there’s nothing more satisfying than being able to transform a relationship gone wrong into a good story to share with the world.

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Notes:

“Raven” was first published in Mariposa 35, 2016.

“The last time we spoke” first appeared in contemporary haibun online 18:1, April 2022, and was reprinted in contemporary haibun 18 (Red Moon Press, 2023).

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About the Author

Kristen Lindquist is a frequent book reviewer for Frogpond and other journals, as well as coordinator for the Haiku Foundation’s Touchstone Award for Haibun. Her haiku chapbook It Always Comes Back, winner of the 2020 Snapshot Press eChapbook Award, can be downloaded for free here. You can read her daily haiku blog at  www.kristenlindquist.com/blog. She lives in Midcoast Maine.