The Month of October

It is all her fault.

A month of haiku and now

My prose has left me.

It is all her fault

A month of haiku and now

I write nothing else.

I started with prose,

but it was dead; lacking depth

then writers workshop

It wasn’t meant to

be. Prose escaped / escapes me forev/er

till I practice more

This is the result of the St. Leo University Sandhill Writers Conference haiku workshop led by Susan Lilley. I had been wrestling with a writing problem. I wanted to write prose, but, as I learned at the workshop, the events demanded to be written in haiku. One experiment was to just change the last lines of a series of haiku. I ended up blaming a colleague for my brain’s sticking to haiku (for such a talker, the idea of writing 5-7-5 syllables is daunting) for six months. However, as alluded to in the haiku series above, being forced to write haiku about the events I had been struggling with created an emotionally honest series of haiku.

The lesson from the workshop is boxed in my notes:

My prose has left me.

I write nothing else.