Writing for your Life

Have you ever picked up a dictionary and said to yourself, I know the word I want is in there? Have you written and rewritten a single sentence five times? Flipped through a thesaurus and then had the word you want come to you, all by itself, like a gentle poltergeist with delusions of Daniel Webster?

That's because you're a writer. I know, you knew that. You did. You really did.

But why didn't that last freelance piece sell? Why didn't your story win the contest? Why can't you research the history of Englewood, New Jersey in 30 minutes and whip out a web piece in time to make the soccer match, bearing the children's halftime snacks? Could it mean you are not the language lover you thought you were? Could it mean you should hang it up and sell shoes instead?

No.

Not that there's anything wrong with selling shoes.

Especially heels, in forty different colors, and nine kinds of stripes. Or athletic lace-ups that take the torture out of step aerobics. And those smooth-bottomed swing dancing treads. No, nothing wrong with shoes, or selling shoes, at all.

It's just that writing is what you do best. It defines you. It's who you are. And what you are experiencing is what all writers go through, the ones who care about their craft and keep on trying, that is.

Sure, it's hard to put yourself out there. You take it on the chin, all those rejections, all those pregnant essays floating around unpublished. But the simple fact is that nobody sells anything they don't send out. And nobody improves their work by slacking off.

You just have to pick yourself up, sit yourself down, and put a keyboard or a pen in your hand. You have to face the blank page and forge ahead. You have to be fearless. It's do or die. No choice. You have a Jones for the published word.

Besides, you can't be as bad as me. I have got to stop telling my friends the lame joke that the dictionary is my favorite book. But it's true, I'm hooked. I love the dictionary. I do. I have 12 of them, not counting the version on my word processor. OK, they're not all in English, but still. Twelve.

So I ask you, what's not to love? The dictionary has all the words in it, and they're spelled right. I can check five definitions and etymology and archaic uses. All the words I could ever want, in easy peasy alphabetical squeegee.

All I have to do is rearrange them. Jumble them up, like socks in the silverware. It's rather humbling, isn't it?

You'd think I could write as fast as I could say apple pie with cheddar cheese, now wouldn't you?

My name is Rae Hallstrom, and Ameriku is my art and my business and my brand.

I hope you'll take a look (move cursor to title and click), and see if Ameriku art suits your decor, or gift giving needs. And feel free to leave a comment here, if you wish.

Ameriku Ltd produces nature-oriented art prints, posters, greeting cards and other items, based on my original haiku and photography.

Ameriku® is the registered trademark of Ameriku Ltd. When you see the Ameriku trademark, you can be sure the work meets my high standards of quality.

All rights reserved.

Dare to Acquire?

This week I am reading a collection of translations of Haiku Master Yosa Buson (1717-1783), and I am struck by this quotation, from a piece called "New Flower Picking":

"What you want to acquire, you should dare to acquire by any means. What you want to see, even though it is with difficulty, you should see. You should not let it pass, thinking there will be another chance to see it or to acquire it. It is quite unusual to have a second chance to materialize your desire."

After reading the haiku presented in the book, I do not think Buson is talking about the acquisition of material goods.

I think he is saying, look around you, take it all in. Life is short, but shorter still for those who live with blinders on. Here is one of his spring haiku:

The pond and the river
have joined together as one
in the spring rain.

---Buson

Buson challenges us to fulfill our own, deepest desires--to go blossom-viewing, or moon-viewing, as the Japanese love to do, or to sit quietly by a pond in the presence of a frog.

My name is Rae Hallstrom, and Ameriku is my art and my business and my brand.

I hope you'll take a look (move cursor to title and click), and see if Ameriku art suits your decor, or gift giving needs. And feel free to leave a comment here, if you wish.

Ameriku Ltd produces nature-oriented art prints, posters, greeting cards and other items, based on my original haiku and photography.

Ameriku® is the registered trademark of Ameriku Ltd. When you see the Ameriku trademark, you can be sure the work meets my high standards of quality.

All rights reserved.

Chili Bugs

There are days that I don't want to write anything, let alone haiku, which is blessedly short but not necessarily easy to pull off. There are days when everything goes wrong, when I'm editing a story for the umpteenth time, when I would rather not stub my fingers on a keyboard or risk paper cuts clearing a jammed printer.

Exaggeration? A bit. I don't stub my fingers or suffer many paper cuts. But maybe you have had days that screamed ouch at you, too.

Yesterday was one of those days for me, and this is the haiku that I wrote:

bugs in the cumin
tossing out spice in the snow
no chili tonight

This is not the sort of haiku to inspire romance or hope or sweet dreams. But it is real, and being real is one of the things that makes it haiku.

There is no room to describe the white larvae burrowed against the clear plastic side of the spice container. There is no extra-syllabic allowance for the tiny brown bodies of the adults, scuttling across the surface, then playing dead in not-behind-the-cupboard-door daylight.

You may have imagined these things. You may not have. But it is not up to haiku to spell them out.

Today I've written one that does not follow classic form, because it flows as one thought, one sentence:

can the ear of corn
left out for the squirrels
be called stolen?

Here I am questioning my interpretation of events. When I give something away, whether it is an ear of critter corn that I leave out on the deck for the squirrels, or pillows and candlesticks that I take to Goodwill, do I have the right to criticize what is done with my gift? Why is it so hard to relinquish control? Yes, the squirrels made off with the corn, instead of allowing me the pleasure of watching them eat, but a gift is a gift, isn't it?

Neither of these haiku is suitable for my Ameriku art, but they are my haiku, just the same. They come from personal experience. They are grounded in nature. And they are short. Painfully short.

My name is Rae Hallstrom, and Ameriku is my art and my business and my brand.

I hope you'll take a look (move cursor to title and click), and see if Ameriku art suits your decor, or gift giving needs. And feel free to leave a comment here, if you wish.

Ameriku Ltd produces nature-oriented art prints, posters, greeting cards and other items, based on my original haiku and photography.

Ameriku® is the registered trademark of Ameriku Ltd. When you see the Ameriku trademark, you can be sure the work meets my high standards of quality.

All rights reserved.

Process

I should probably mention that I prefer classic haiku, haiku grounded in first-hand observation of nature, sometimes with a Zen-like bent.

In my Ameriku brand of art, it might not be clear at first that the verbal art and the visual art were created separately, and fused later. But the poetry was not written with the photo, or artwork, in mind.

Only a very tiny percentage of my haiku qualify to become part of my Ameriku art. The ones that do are often poems that have taken a great deal of time.

For example, yesterday's spur of the moment haiku:

fresh white snow
something is always growing
cold feet

would be revised today to read:

new star-speckled snow
something is always out there--
cold feet

and could be changed again, and might be.

Normally, I keep this process to myself. It is not easy to expose raw work. It's a bit embarrassing. It's definitely humbling.

So I am being completely honest when I say that, while I would like to create a haiku that I am satisfied with on the first try, most of the time, I can't. Most of the time, it takes a little more effort than that. Sometimes, a lot of effort.

My name is Rae Hallstrom, and Ameriku is my art and my business and my brand.

I hope you'll take a look (move cursor to title and click), and see if Ameriku art suits your decor, or gift giving needs. And feel free to leave a comment here, if you wish.

Ameriku Ltd produces nature-oriented art prints, posters, greeting cards and other items, based on my original haiku and photography.

Ameriku® is the registered trademark of Ameriku Ltd. When you see the Ameriku trademark, you can be sure the work meets my high standards of quality.

All rights reserved.

Natural Observation

Observation is the essence of haiku, and particularly, observation of nature. A poem that hopes to focus on the present, ought to have its origins in a specific moment in a specific present, in other words, in a real observation by the poet.

This could be accomplished by looking out the window, without thinking about things that went right (or wrong) at work, without making a mental list of household chores---or fretting over what the doctor said.

The primary observation could be made while shoveling the driveway, pulling weeds in the garden, or walking along a wooded trail. It could be a smell, or a sound.

Not everything in nature is beautiful. To face things as they are, rather than as we wish they could be, takes discipline, and honesty.

Here is one I wrote today:

fresh white snow
something is always growing
cold feet

This involved my observation of a change in the weather, the new snow in the morning, and then coupling change to growth and fear. Real cold feet, and metaphorical cold feet. Both.

My name is Rae Hallstrom, and Ameriku is my art and my business and my brand.

I hope you'll take a look (move cursor to title and click), and see if Ameriku art suits your decor, or gift giving needs. And feel free to leave a comment here, if you wish.

Ameriku Ltd produces nature-oriented art prints, posters, greeting cards and other items, based on my original haiku and photography.

Ameriku® is the registered trademark of Ameriku Ltd. When you see the Ameriku trademark, you can be sure the work meets my high standards of quality.

Layout

In Japan, sometimes haiku is written as one continuous vertical line, sometimes two or three vertical lines. An arrangement of vertical lines is in harmony with the Japanese language. In English, it is gimmicky.

But one long horizontal line doesn't usually suit English haiku, that is, haiku that are written in the English language. So, English haiku are arranged (typically) in three lines. But if you need to break up the lines a bit differently, that is OK, too.

There is nothing sacred about the rule of three lines. It is not the only acceptable layout.

Sometimes I need to move the lines around in order to arrange them onto my artwork. But the poems are still haiku. And of course, I spent many years working strictly within the 5-7-5 guidelines.

Someone once said you have to know the rules, to know how to break them. And that's true. You have to know the rules well enough, through practice, to understand intuitively when tweaking them honors the spirit of haiku.

My name is Rae Hallstrom, and Ameriku is my art and my business and my brand. I hope you'll take a look (move cursor to title and click), and see if Ameriku art suits your decor, or gift giving needs.

Ameriku Ltd produces nature-oriented art prints, posters, greeting cards and other items, based on my original haiku and photography.

Ameriku® is the registered trademark of Ameriku Ltd. When you see the Ameriku trademark, you can be sure the work meets my high standards of quality.

How to make haiku, Step 4

Step 4. Fine Tune

Now is the time to polish those words, to remove unwieldy phrases, to choose better verbs. In this step you fine tune the haiku.

Part of fine-tuning is counting syllables, and staying close to the limits of 5 syllables for the 1st line, 7 syllables for the 2nd line, and 5 syllables for the 3rd line.

While it is important to be brief and to follow the form where possible, meaning trumps form. If you need one extra syllable, and leaving it out makes the poem sound peculiar, then you put that extra syllable onto the page.

Often, the meaning does not demand that many words, or that many syllables. It's OK to go under the 5-7-5 syllabic count. You allow more empty space, you invite greater brevity, and you stay true to the essence of haiku.

My name is Rae Hallstrom, and Ameriku is my art and my business and my brand. I hope you'll take a look (move cursor to title and click), and see if Ameriku art suits your decor, or gift giving needs.

Ameriku Ltd produces nature-oriented art prints, posters, greeting cards and other items, based on my original haiku and photography.

Ameriku® is the registered trademark of Ameriku Ltd. When you see the Ameriku trademark, you can be sure the work meets my high standards of quality.