About This Issue’s Guest Tanka-Prose Editor: Gerry Jacobson

Gerry Jacobson lives in Canberra, Australia, and can be found writing tanka in its cafés. He was a geologist in a past life and now celebrates reincarnation as a dancer.

He writes:

Forty years a geologist. And suddenly stop: there’s space in my life. It takes a while to discover that I can write. Chance encounters: a book on haiku falls off the shelf, a newspaper ad for a tanka workshop. What are tanka? One Sunday afternoon changes my life: Amelia Fielden tells me I can write tanka and suggests I write one a day. I do this for a year or two, and start to publish.
 
Another local workshop on journalling; that births a writing group. We meet every Friday morning and write freely, creatively to prompts. So a growing pile of tanka. A growing pile of journal and memoir pieces. What can I do with them? I discover tanka prose.
 
It’s a clunky name. I believe the original monogatari is better translated as “tanka tales.” But we seem to have adopted “tanka prose.” Using its basic form of prose paragraph with a single tanka, I start to submit pieces to journals. The tanka prose editor of Haibun Today, Claire Everett, challenges me, asks for pieces with multiple tanka. I oblige.
 
It’s mainly about getting my stories out. I sometimes write haibun but find haiku really challenging. I love the Japanese aesthetic: wabi sabi, yūgen, ma, and that we’re heirs to a 1,000-year-old tradition. Love that so many writers are cottoning on.

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