About This Issue’s Haibun Guest Editor
Doris Lynch’s collection Swimming to Alaska was published in November by Bottom Dog Press. A mix of haibun and free-verse poems, it describes her adventures in Alaska, including a year in Kivalina, an Inupiaq village above the Arctic Circle. Her debut book of haibun, Meteor Hound, was published earlier this year by MediaJazz. (See a review of that book here.) She has won fellowships from the Alaska Council on the Arts, Indiana Arts Council, and the Chester H. Jones Foundation, and awards from the Poetry Society of America, Genjuan International Haibun Contest, and the Haiku Society of America Haibun Contest. She lives in Bloomington, Indiana.
She writes:
When I came upon haibun in 2010, I immediately felt the dynamic pull of interweaving poetry and prose. Having written free-verse poems for decades, I’d always found the haiku form nearly impossible to write. Not the shortness of it, but it’s encapsulating a moment as complex and contradictory as life itself. Prose—finding the words and rhythm—comes much easier for me. I love the breadth of haibun subjects: country roads, berry-picking, hiking, kindness to strangers, French hotels, romance, travelogues, and the loss of loved ones. Also, the adventuring, praising, even warnings. Surprise, wonder, anger, longing, and all the other emotions expressed in haiku, those mini-capsules of life. And, in the best haibun, the way the elements snap together, forming a perfect closure: the triad of title, prose, and haiku becoming one.