Report of Bindii Meeting for 28 February 2021

February’s Zoom meeting was an evaluation of haibun we had been tasked with writing since we last met. The results were quite diverse: Maeve offered a short story style haibun with paragraphs of prose punctuated by haiku at the end of each. Julia also offered a short story with a twist at the end, underlined by a tanka. Her example brought up the question of whether a poem could be used to clarify the text above it. We decided that this was certainly an option.

Lynette’s was a shorter, first draft haibun with options for the final haiku, which we successfully workshopped. Stella had two short paragraphs, each with a haiku at the end, and her titles needed some work, which she modified successfully, and Steve had a travel journal-style with a single haiku at the end – a bit unfocussed, so some pruning was in order.

 A common issue we found in the writing was lack of focus, which we agreed could be solved with tighter editing. Some works had no title, and we noted that title, body and poem all formed critical components of a haibun and that each had to serve a purpose toward the whole.

Present: Lynette, Stella, Steve, Julia, and Maeve via email

Minutes by Steve Wigg