2013 NaHaiWriMo Report

by Cara Holman

On 1 February 2013, Cara Holman posted the following NaHaiWriMo report to the blog page for HSA Oregon (for the Haiku Society of America’s Oregon region). Links have been disabled or removed where no longer available, such as for the HSA Oregon blog and Facebook page.

Back in February of 2011, Haiku Society of America first vice president Michael Dylan Welch created the NaHaiWriMo daily haiku writing challenge on Facebook as a way of encouraging haiku poets to develop a daily writing habit. The response was overwhelming!

Although originally conceived of as a annual 28-day challenge, due to popular demand NaHaWriMo has continued daily, with different haiku poets providing the prompts, since February 2011. Cara Holman (Oregon) and Johnny Baranski (southwest Washington) have both been past prompters. The number of participants has grown to over 1,200; they range from new haiku poets to those who have been writing for decades. All are welcome (there are newcomers all the time), and the NaHaiWriMo community is very supportive.

Michael has created a NaHaiWriMo website to provide information about the challenge, including how to participate. February attracts the greatest number of participants, and the prompts for February 1 and 2 have already been posted. (Prompts are generally posted one day in advance, to accommodate those in other time zones. This is an international community.)

I hope to see many of you participating! Additionally, I will be using the Facebook “share” feature to share Michael's prompts on the HSA Oregon Facebook page, and I encourage you to also leave your haiku in the Comments thread there, so we can showcase Oregon and southwest Washington haiku poets. Happy writing!