Report on the Bindii Meeting July 12 2025

 Julia Wakefield, Subha Goonaratne, Radhika DeSilva, Udara Thambapanni, Stella Damarjati and Lynette Arden met on Saturday July 12 at 3.30pm, using Zoom. Apologies were received from Maeve Archibald, Ewan Rourke and Maureen Sexton. The attendees all brought some haiku on the two themes of winter and water, as arranged previously.

Subha reported on her beginners’ haiku workshop, which was outstandingly successful. She presented it in Sydney in partnership with Leanne Mumford, and they had over 20 attendees. Subha mentioned that she felt the large number of participants was directly due to advertising on social media as well as putting flyers in local libraries, and she was delighted to see that the students consisted of all age groups and many different ethnic backgrounds. She will try to encourage some of the students to join our Zoom group. Lyn also suggested that she direct them to our Haiku Bindii blogspot https://haiku-bindii.blogspot.com to get some idea of what we do. Lyn encouraged our more recent members to contribute some haiku to the website, as well as a short bio.

Julia reported that she had very little response to her Winter Words haiku workshop, which was to be held in June at Norton Summit in SA, so it was cancelled. She will run the workshop again next year, this time at a weekend when there may be more people available. She will also follow Subha’s example and employ social media to publicise it.

We then completed two rengay on each of the themes, with all six attendees taking part in each of them. Lyn will post the final pieces on the Bindii blogspot under a new Rengay section. It proved as enjoyable as the previous session, but we felt it’s probably easier to produce a rengay between two or three people, where each person can contribute more so as to render the theme more cohesive. We also noticed that giving the rengay a title helped to pull the poem together.

Please read the rengay on our new Rengay page. https://haiku-bindii.blogspot.com/p/rengay.html

We discussed the idea of running a welcoming session for new members, which gives them the opportunity to feel their way a bit more into writing haiku. We will see how many expressions of interest emerge as a result of Subha’s workshop. Julia will also contact the two members who wanted to come to the Norton Summit workshop to see if they would like to join our group. 

Our next Zoom meeting is scheduled for Saturday, September 13, at 3.30pm Adelaide time.

 

Julia Wakefield