We are the bookend sisters. I am Susan Lee Kerr, the eldest and the wordy one. She is Meg Kaczyk, the youngest (of 6 of us siblings) and the arty one. We each made our living by our art/craft, and now continue to practice. So of course I turned to her for the cover of my new haiku collection, Learning to Leave. As I did for the first one, The Walk Home. This time there’s more to the story.
Meg offered me four paintings she thought could work. Elegy, with its misted blues, greens and whites, its dashes of red, spoke to me right away. It looked like they might be prayer flags. That incidentally resonates with meaning between us because Meg was widowed two years ago, tall banner flags part of her Joe’s burial ceremony. Bookend sisters again, on journeys of care with our husbands.
But there’s more! This is a story with layers. Meg’s painting was based on her response to a poem. She says:
You can see how I work… I wrote my own notes on my response to the poem. The watercolor snippet was a piece from a sketchbook (the whole sketch was of a boat at a dock with festive flags). That system was how I arrived at abstraction.
And there, do you see it? The poem itself is in haiku form! It’s by Linda M. Robertson. For ease of reading I repeat it here:
Searching for you, the devoted sun comes first to your bedroom window.
It is titled Elegy for Evan. Evan was Linda’s son, who died in a mountain climbing accident, Meg worked with Linda on a whole exhibition a few years ago. Meg has now written, and painted, her own book, uniquely beautiful and sensitive, Notes from Next to the Bed: a caregiving love story in words and pictures. For more on Meg, and Linda too, see Meg’s site here.
So, story within story within story, grief within grief within grief. As I say on the back cover of Learning to Leave, haiku (and here I add art-making) is a way. A way of life, a way through life. The 65 haiku in the collection catch living moments of the everyday over the last five years. For a free sampling watch this space, and jump here on this site. Or jump here to buy your very own copy, available only through me at present.
Learning to Leave is published, and haiku is a way — a way of life, a way through life. Restless winds, a vixen’s call, emptying packing boxes, kicking through a mood, a fingernail of moon…
The story behind the book? Life changing accident — we all know that phrase. In 2019 my husband had a simple fall which resulted in paralysis from spinal cord injury. Change indeed for us both, a forceful entry into a new world of disability, medics and carers… of uprooting from a home of forty years and ultimately reweaving the pieces of life.
Susan Lee Kerr’s second haiku collection, Learning to Leave, gathers sixty-five luminous moments — everyday fragments reimagined, life’s challenges met, where haiku and art quietly mend the heart’s tapestry, one healing breath at a time.
— Iliyana Stoyanova, President, British Haiku Society
Click here books by SLK for more details on the book and on me. To purchase, please request on the comments option on this site, or Instagram @slkerrcreative and we’ll take it from there.
Ahoy there! It’s August, butterfly time. Haiku? Here’s one I wrote earlier:
high summer the gatekeeper and the admiral come to call
That’s the Red Admiral, on our patio table. Do you know the Gatekeeper? A little orange-y brown character. And of course buddleia is what calls them.
That haiku is among 65 published in my new collection, Learning to Leave. Watch this space for the cover, and who, what, where, why and when.
Pardon me, but it’s been quite a while since I’ve updated Be Here Now. And they’ve updated the the dashboard controls. That white block needs to be a colour, and that courier font looks hideous. But you’ll have to put up with it for now. Learning curve ahead.
Imagine the thrill of having an outstanding USA writer-blogger choose to feature your book. So there’s me, living that for real. Thank you Charlotte Digregorio, been following your Daily Haiku for years, a daily gift of creme de la creme. And for your comments: ‘beautiful striking imagery… fresh expression… simplicity, yet elegance.’ See more here, along with double-filtered haiku.
When people compliment the cover of my haiku collection I’m extra-specially happy — because it’s praise of my bookend sister. I’m the oldest of six siblings, the writer at the top. She’s the youngest , the art one, Meg Kaczyk I made my career with words — copywriting, feature writing, teaching writing, books. She made her career with graphic arts, and now with her own paintings, and teaching art.
So of course when I was bringing out The Extraordinary Dr Epstein, I asked Meg to do the cover. Besides being an art director she is of course a greatgranddaughter of Ephraim Epstein! Then, five years later, I asked her for cover art for The Walk Home
Meg’s own style is free, exuberant,with strong colour, strong movement (like her! She dances too.) She took up my request and a literal idea I gave her and offered me several choices, including several brand new works. Though I loved them, they felt too strong for haiku. Oh dear! — the internal battle in me between loyalty to my book and loyalty to my sister. Could I say no? I’m glad we are both professionals. I looked on her website (click here), and there I found the softer visual sound of haiku.
She now has a copy of ‘her’ book/my book. I own two of her works and now I’m saying to everyone including the Chiswick Book Festival, happening now online, here’s the art of my big little sister Meg. As well as creative bookends we are geographic bookends too — me in London, she in Discovery Bay near Seattle. Just all of the Atlantic Ocean and the USA (and our four siblings) in between us.
‘Look around, look around you,’ Eliza Hamilton’s song to her husband Alexander Hamilton is one of my current earworms — along with many others from Hamilton, the energetic, intelligent, amazing musical. Look around. Some of us are emerging from corona virus lockdown, our senses newly raw to the wider world. So you might think today’s tweeted haiku is current, what with so many cafes still sadly closed.
closed café emerald grass grows in the awning gutter
But, honest guv, I wrote it in 2008. I don’t know how others do it, but when I scrawl a possible haiku, I write the date. And when I get to typing it, I make a brief note of the circumstance when the haiku occurred. In this case: 6/9/08, Kew Road en route to Richmond.
After one rejection (though actually in haiku-world it’s not really rejection; more like non-acceptance), I got round to sending it out again four years later. The British Haiku Societyjournal Blithe Spirit published it in summer 2012, bless! And I chose to put it in my 2020 retrospective haiku bookThe Walk Home
So, a bit raw, newly tuned to the strangeness of things, use this time. Look around.
The photo was taken along Chiswick Mall in October 2016. This turns out to be a time travel blogpost.
There I was, driving along the 316, skirting Richmond town centre. And it was raining. Hard. Some wind, too. And
the water meadow
mist, rain and a slanting man
with his umbrella
fills me with nostalgia
for a place I’ve never been
It was like, not-like, sort-of-like a Japanese woodblock print, you know, Hokusai or similar. And I felt it. All in one drive-by flash, the flood water meadows of Richmond. Too much in the moment for a haiku so it had to be a tanka. This one turned out to be exactly to form: 5-7-5-7-7. The pleasure of tanka being the privilege, indeed necessity of naming emotions (in the last two lines).
Ooops, here’s another variation on first go and the final appearance in The Walk Home.
in the small hours
thunder growls between
my husband’s snores
The above was on Twitter a few days back. Whereas, I should have put the book’s version:
in the small hours
between my husband’s snores
thunder growls
The deciding issue with editor Kim Richardson (see books page) was that dangling word ‘between’ which really does belong with my husband. And his snores. And to move ‘between’ down would leave ‘thunder growls’ rather too starkly short, with a very long final line. So the new version has the classic haiku shape; not that we worry so much about strict haiku rules anymore. What’s more important is the little surprise or twist of the final line. After all, following ‘between my husband’s snores’ instead of my haiku moment of thunder it could be: ‘I snatch some sleep’ ‘I sigh’ ‘I poke him in the ribs’ ‘silence reigns’ or… go on, you do one.
Today’s haiku on Twitter — well I just did not have a photo to fit. You just had to be there. Which is, after all, the point of haiku.
full moon
we walk the night meadow
white grass either side
summer’s open window
lets in the sound of distance
After posting a dozen haiku here day by day, and feeding them through to Twitter, now I am trying a reverse. That is, posting haiku and photo (there’s a name for that: haiga) on Twitter and feeding them through to this blogsite. I wasn’t wild about the way the blogsite comes through as a tweet. So… we shall see. Feeling free to feel experimental.
summer’s open window was yesterday on Twitter. Eeep! I’ve just realised that I tweeted the pre-edit version of today’s haiku — sun after rain — so I have just deleted it. To re-do, with my actually moving plashing fountain too. So which do you prefer? Here’s the one that’s in the book, thanks to lovely editor Kim Richardson of Alba Publishing. Followed by the original version.
sun after rain
silver water in spate
from the drain pipe
sun after rain
silver water gushes
from the drain pipe
It really was gushing. But… gush isn’t a very pleasant word, somehow.
Be here now 