Featured Writer: Tom Painting

First-person reflections on the art of writing haibun

Sheltered in Place

I keep coming back to this: A small cabin on a remote bay in the Thousand Islands. An eleven-year-old boy on a fishing trip with his father. The boy stands on the shore. An aluminum rowboat nudges the dock. Up the short rise the boy hears the creak of a screen door. His father steps onto the porch, holding two fishing poles and a tackle box, a lit cigarette between his lips. In very few years a laundromat will open at the far end of the bay, dumping enough phosphate-laced wastewater to ruin the fishing for a generation. The unfiltered Camels will eventually kill his father. And while many things come to no good, this carefree childhood memory remains pristine and perfect. 

case sensitive
my thoughts secure
in The Cloud

The haibun above is a small slice of the ongoing conversation I have in my head relative to my relationship with my father. It was tumultuous, to say the least, and one that for years left me brooding. But writing “Sheltered in Place” enabled me to narrow the focus and, borrowing from the cliché, discover a silver lining inside the dark cloud. This is what writing haibun does. Scaled down, I am able to see things from different angles and make room for other possibilities. My haibun come from a concoction of ingredients that make up life—memory, imagination, the here-and-now. Through the act of writing I can make some sense of it all. In the words of writer Patricia Hampl, “I write to find out what I know.” 

I write every day, trying to pay close attention to my surroundings and the ongoing dialogue within. This constitutes a kind of journaling. When things are not clicking, I resort to a list of starting lines; choosing one, I write without pause for a minimum of five minutes and see where this writing practice might take me. Here are some starters:

I don’t understand…

 

I noticed…



I wonder…

I was reminded of



I think…



I’m surprised that…



I’d like to know… 



I realize…



If I were…



If ____________,  then…



I’m not sure…



Although it seems…

For there to be a story, those starters need to lead into a narrative: someone is somewhere, something happens (maybe flirting with conflict), someone learns something. That someone is often me as the protagonist, although at times I am cast as a minor character and sometimes as the observer. While I feel beholden to the truth, there is always a bit of inventiveness when I finally come around to settling on what to tell and begin to coax out the “want” in the story, which may be stated directly or implied. In the act of writing, I often arrive at an epiphany. By extension, I hope the reader comes away having learned something about me and, even better, about themselves.

Each day’s writing is fair game for haibun or perhaps haiku. I keep each in a separate file only to mix and match later if I feel the haibun has found its footing. After I muddle through a first draft, I revise. I read my work to discover what I might still need to write about. What ideas, facts did I miss in writing the first time? Does my haibun say what I want it to say? Would I understand what I meant if I were not the writer? Am I assuming everyone will know what I am talking about? I revise for order. Could the images be presented in a better way? I revise through grammar, removing all modifiers and prepositional phrases from the haibun to get to the main subject/verb (object) (heart) of the poem. Then, one-by-one I reinsert modifiers and prepositional phrases, checking at each step that the addition is necessary.

Finally, I revise for audience. I take into consideration what I know about the editor who will be reading my haibun or the kind of work favored by a particular journal. Before sending anything off, I pretend that I am the reader. The litmus test is in the believing and doubting. In so short a piece as haibun, no doubt can remain. Does the story feel true to life; credible? Is the language sufficiently crafted to fit the character, setting, and action in the story. When read aloud is there a cadence or prosody to the words. 

I had been writing haiku for years before giving haibun a try. Their worlds appeared far apart until I realized the two forms create a perfect marriage. Where haibun sees the forest, the other observes not the trees, but the birds among the branches and may go undetected unless we open a discerning ear or eye, pause to take a breath or touch an unfamiliar surface. And it is only when I pause for a moment  that I realize how each of us is a work in progress, and that the exercise of writing haibun has simply given me a way to savor a portion of the bigger story.

Viewfinder
 
Took a long walk
Solved the crossword
Made love to my wife
Read Sam Shepard died
ending the illusion
of forever

West Texas
another mile
of freight train

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Notes: “Sheltered in Place” originally appeared in Drifting Sands Haibun, Issue 2. “Viewfinder” originally appeared in Haibun Today, September 2019, and was selected for wind flowers: The Red Moon Anthology of English-Language Haiku 2019 (Red Moon Press, 2020).

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About the Author

Tom Painting teaches junior high humanities and facilitates a birding club at The Paideia School in Atlanta, Georgia.

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