Diana Webb

I often shone at school at creative writing or composition as it was often called at that time. My English teacher had serious doubts about my studying English at university. ‘Are you going to be a writer?’ she asked me around that time. The poet Kathleen Raine maintained that for a would-be poet, English is not the best option. Contrary to her parents’ wishes she studied Botany at Cambridge instead. I wish I’d heeded both her advice and that of my teacher, as I gained a rather poor degree that undermined my confidence in my powers as an author for several decades.

Then, one day, a close relation suggested I should try to write a story for very small children. I had a go and when my first child was still a baby. A children’s author who I’d met through the local maternity network, suggested I send one or two to the BBC for consideration for their Listen with Mother slot. Eventually, a few were accepted and I listened with pride as I heard them broadcast.

Soon after, I became acquainted with a friend who had a friend who was a commissioning editor for children’s books at a well-known publishing house. This woman liked my work and through her, I began to publish slightly longer stories for children who had just learned to read. My confidence increased.

At some stage, a few years later, I picked up a tiny black book in the bookshop in the Royal Festival Hall called The Haiku Hundred. I’d never heard of haiku before although I have a recollection of hearing on my husband’s car radio an enthusiastic voice talking of the inception of either a society or a publication involving a breath length poem.

Soon after, I embarked on a poetry correspondence course called Chrysalis, the brainchild of a poet called Jay Ramsey, who alas died a couple of years ago in his early sixties. The course dealt with every type of poetry from epic to romantic to minimalist which of course included haiku. It was this last form that appealed to me most and I soon began composing haiku after haiku, mostly five, seven, five in syllabic structure.

A friend soon told me that a poet friend of hers had told her there was a magazine entirely devoted to haiku. I was incredulous but decided to submit a few. My very first published haiku were published in this particular journal, Haiku Quarterly, otherwise known as simply HQ.

Around this time I was working for an organisation that promoted mental health and had been appointed editor of its magazine which included poetry. I received a submission from someone whose name I recognised as that of a poet whose work I had seen in that issue of HQ where my own work first appeared. When I shared this information with the man in question on the phone, he said he’d like to meet me. Soon he arrived in the office where I was working and not long after I knew I had met the love of my life. His name was Tony, short for Anthony, Anthony Marcoff, who is now a highly respected writer of tanka and tanka prose. Tony told me about other publications devoted to haiku, namely Time Haiku, founded by Erica Facey a half Japanese woman whose mantle I have now inherited, and also Blithe Spirit, the journal of the British Haiku Society which I joined straight away and of which I am still an active member, often leading haibun workshops at their events.

I discovered haibun, first through a wonderful book of creative writing exercises called ‘Sing me the Creation’ by Paul Matthews, a poet who taught poetry and gymnastics at Emerson College, a place where teachers were trained in the methods of Rudolf Steiner. One of the sections of the book dealt with the writing of haiku and following on, an exercise which suggested one should go for a walk, wring haiku along the way, and on returning home, write about the walk from memory, inserting haiku where they’d occurred. I was currently going on regular Sunday morning walks in various locations in the county of Surrey where I live, so I tried out this suggestion many times. Some of the resulting pieces were published, in Time Haiku, in Blithe Spirit, and also in a new haiku journal that had just sprung up called Presence. I soon discovered that haibun could be about taking a walk through any experience, not just a stretch of terrain. My favourite themes from past experience are from three areas of my early life: my time as a pupil in a convent school; my visits to the home of four unmarried aunties and one uncle, all born in Victorian times; my frequent visits to the ballet in the sixties when the names of Fonteyn and Nureyev were on everyone’s lips.

It was through the late Ken Jones, an influential member of BHS and a keen promoter of haibun in English, that I found out about Contemporary Haibun Online, and later, through a chance online encounter with Jeffrey Woodward, that I became a regular contributor to Haibun Today, one of four participants in a collaborative chain of haibun across three continents, published in a short pamphlet entitled Quartet, and also a member of Ray Rasmussen’s Writers’ Workshop. Through all this, my confidence increased a hundredfold and I soon found myself on the BHS committee as the Events Officer in which capacity I organised several successful events including a wonderful conference to which only 12 people came, which involved a candlelight reading of haiku about the moon in a very old chapel in the county of Essex, founded by one of the monks from the abbey at Lindisfarne.

That piece started with the image of a rainbow and this piece which won me my second major award for a haibun, the Grand Prix in the Genjuan haibun contest in 2016, concludes with one.