Featured Writer: Jim Kacian

Jim Kacian is founder and president of The Haiku Foundation, founder and owner of Red Moon Press, editor-in-chief of Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years, and author of some 20 books, primarily of haiku. In a former life he played and taught tennis professionally for more than 4 decades, and in his current one he remains an avid ocean kayaker. He lives in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia with his partner of 27 years, Maureen Gorman.

The Deluge Next Time

Over billions of years the water-born inhabitants of a water-rich planet acquire awareness of their unusual and favorable environment. In their simplicity they acknowledge water as their life's blood, and the sea as their mother. As they become aware of their awareness, however, they conclude the maker of the planet, and of all things, must be comprised not of water but solely of that awareness. They maintain this fiction until, through their own ministrations, they melt the remaining ice of the polar caps and inundate nearly all the habitable land. The conflicts that ensue eradicate nearly the whole of the species, for their weapons are terrible and, employed at a distance, do not require conscience. Among the few who survive reemerges the old beliefs: that they arose from water, and will return to water, and that the other elements—earth and air and fire—are beliefs that belong to other beings, other places, even, perhaps—if one could fathom it—to the stars.

a dazzle on the sea and i go there

Jim Kacian's thoughts on what's worth reading:

I don't want to tell you how to write, but I can tell you what I think is worth reading:

I want to know the certainty only fantasy can provide. I want to consider the questions only reality can raise. I want to understand the big issues that only details can substantiate. I want to live in the moment that only infinity can engender. I want these rendered with a seamless brilliance, a coherent illogic, in an approachable, untrustworthy style. I want to be engaged, but I don't want a commitment. Everybody has a life, but few can create one (or several) in words. That's what I want to read.

Who's managed this? Høeg and Melville, Borges and Blake, Kerouac not Ginsburg, Eliot not Eliot, Austen not Auster. Closer to home: Basho and Boldman, Issa and—you?

What did you have in mind?