The National Haiku Writing Month, February 2011, is now over. This was a month of writing at least one haiku each day. It has been a wonderful experience: the writing was great, the organizer and host Michael Dylan Welch (Graceguts) guided the group gently but steadily and the comments were very helpful without being overwhelming. Thank you Michael Dylan Welch, Alan Summers, and fellow participants!

I treated this writing month as a writing retreat. Reading up on haiku technique, enjoying other people’s haiku and getting into the habit of observing my own personal responses to the world. It is like learning to frame in words moments, like a photographer captures them in pictures or an artist sketches them. It is a form of mediation of experience and meditation in one.

Now that it is over, while I miss the discipline of the writing challenge, the support and energy of the community, I also know I gained enough to continue the practice.

I was chaffed when one of my own haiku was one among those highlighted in Red Dragonfly by Melissa Allen. You can read her whole post and enjoy her selections; better still, read her blog!  By the way, she writes great experimental as well as ‘normal’ haiku.

While the actual NaHaiWriMo is now officially over, Alan Summers of With Words and Area 17 has agreed to continue prompting eager haiku poets for the month of March. I look forward to responding to the prompts as well as Alan’s, and the participants’ most helpful comments

I am finding out about the plethora of haiku groups and communities writing and commenting on each other’s work. I will be catching up with them soon. Meanwhile, I am exploring The Haiku Foundation’s site and blog: a vital resource for those bitten by the haiku bug.

As of today, I will be posting my haiku in my main blog, in my growing collection of haiku and also in Stella’s Stones; as usual, I will tweet it as well! Haiku published elsewhere will be presented with fanfare!

The file NaHaiWriMo (National Haiku Writing Month) will be active again next year, in February, when the next official NaHaiWriMo will be taking place.