About
Through The Seasons Authors
Haijin Masago
(Creator of Rengay Through The Seasons):
Vaughn Seward (aka
Masago) is from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. He became interested
in Haiku in 2005 and has since written numerous haiku, senyru,
and tanka. He participates in several Yahoo haiku news groups
and in 2006 started a haiku blog. In April, 2006, after being
involved in several Renku projects he discovered the idea of 3x3
interlocking renku. Later this came to be known as
Rubricku. In
August, 2007 he completed a
year-long linked haiku project and
in August 2008 he completed a year-long rengay project, Through
The Seasons. He has
just started a
one-year Renhai project.
Haijin
Karina Klesko (Rengay #4):
Karina lives
in Louisiana and is formerly from upstate New York. She
has been writing most of her life. In addition to writing
children's books and Christian bible study plans, she
writes rengay, tanka, renga, renku, and other poetry
forms. She also works with young children developing haiku
learning exercises. In 2004 Karina founded the The Outlaw
Poets Yahoo poetry news group which was established for
the sake of creativity in writing rather than for keeping
to strict forms of western writing, leaning more towards
eastern style forms:
The OutlawPoets at Yahoo.
Karina is also
the owner of Poetrywriting.org and sponsors
Sketchbook, Karina Klesko editor, John Daleiden
editor. Link to the latest
Sketchbook on-line.
Masago joined
The Outlaw Poets in the Fall of 2006 and after that wrote
numerous renku and rengay together with Karina. In fact,
it was with Karina that Masago first participated in
writing a rengay. It is therefore appropriate that Karina
was the first guest writer in this project.
Haijin
Daniela Bullas (Rengay #8):
Daniela
Draghia-Bullas was born in 1969 in Deva, Romania. She
holds a degree in archaeology and museology and has lived
with her husband in the U.K. since 2001. Daniela started
writing poetry and prose in her teens. Her short stories
won her the "Scanteia tineretului" Award in 1988. Her
editorial debut was the "Umbra Libelulei" (Dragonfly's
Shadow), a haiku anthology. Between 2003 and 2007 she has
been a member of the editorial staff of two Romanian
magazines. She has also published two books:
Dictionarul verbelor neregulate din limba engleza /
Dictionary of English Irregular Verbs (together
with Cristian Mocanu)
Scufita Albastra [Little Blue Riding Hood],
(children's prose)
Several of her other works have also appeared in various
on-line journals.
Masago met Daniela via the The Outlaw Poets Yahoo group
and since the Spring of 2007 they have written numerous
renku and rengay together. Daniela likes to write haiku in
the 5-7-5 / 7-7 syllable format so each verse in the
eighth rengay of the series is in this format.
Haijin Max
Verhart (Rengay #12):
Max Verhart
was born in 1944 in the Netherlands. He has written and
published haiku since approximately 1980 and has held the
following haiku association positions:
* President of the Haiku Circle Netherlands (1999-2003).
* European director of the World Haiku Association
(2001-2002).
* Member of the editorial staff of the Red Moon Anthology
(USA) since 2002.
* Co-editor of the Dutch/Flemish quarterly Vuursteen
(Flint), the oldest haiku journal in Europe
(2003-present).
* Associate editor for Modern Haiku, USA (2007-present).
Translations of Max's haiku have been published in
journals, e-zines, and anthologies in at least twelve
languages. Individual volumes include:
* Zijn met wat is (To be with what is), 1993.
* Een beetje adem, 1998 (English version: some breath,
1999).
* Geen woord teveel/not a word too much, 2000.
* Om kort te gaan (to be short) 2005.
* With Betty Kaplan: smoke signals - nine rengay, 2003.
* With Horst Ludwig: twelve moons/zwolf Monde/twelve moons
- a bilingual rengay series (with English translation),
2004.
Max started his own small private publishing house called
't schrijverke' (whirlywig) in 2005.
Masago first encountered Max's work in issues of the
Outlaw Poet's Sketchbook. In each issue he and Betty
Kaplan wrote Rengay that Masago found captivating and
original. Masago was delighted when Max agreed to
participate in this Rengay series.
Haijin
Yvonne Myers (Rengay #16):
Yvonne Myers
is the moderator of the
Off-the-wall "haiku" group:
Yvonne and
Masago wrote a rengay together in June 2007. Since then
numerous rengay have been written by members of
Off-the-Wall.
Haijin
Toshiaki Koike (Rengay #21):
Toshiaki Koike
was born in Iwakura, a town near Nagoya, Japan. Toshiaki
attended Shizuoka University where he studied Japanese
Literature and was the leader of the University's haiku
circle. It was there that he met his future wife Carol who
had come to Japan from Canada as an exchange student.
Through a later exchange of tanka and haiku poems a
romance developed and they were eventually married. Ten
years later they moved to Edmonton, Alberta, Canada where
Carol's mother was living. Their story is more fully
described here:
http://www.ualberta.ca/~publicas/folio/34/20/06.html
Masago met Toshiaki at the 2006 Edmonton Summer Arts
Festival where Toshiaki was displaying some of his
artwork. They became fast friends and have been meeting
regularly every two weeks since then to discuss English
language, Japanese language & culture, and haiku poetry.
Haijin Jon Davey (Rengay #26):
Jon Davey who was born in Redruth, England. He gained a
degree in English and European Thought & Literature from
the Cambridge College of Art and Technology and later
became a primary school teacher in Camborne, Cornwall. Jon
is now living in a converted barn in the small village of
Brea with partner Philippa and family. Jon began writing
haiku in the early 1980's.
Masago and Jon were partners in a couple of Off-the-Wall
Rengay exercises in July, 2007:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pcytHc47X3uDqqFJHbSF9aA
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pcytHc47X3uDWTQXn2hE0EA
[Off-the-Wall:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/offthewallhaiku/]
Haijin Betty Kaplan (Rengay #31):
Betty Kaplan is now retired from the Fashion Industry. She
used to arrange clothes, now she arranges words. Betty
started writing haiku in the early 1990's. Haiku changed
her life. She has been published in Frogpond, Lynx,
Woodpecker, South by Southeast, World Haiku Review,
Sketchbook, American Tanka , Simply Haiku and CHO
and Sketchbook.
Masago first read Betty's work in Sketchbook where she has
written many rengay with Max Verhart:
http://poetrywriting.org/
Masago was drawn to the freshness and creativity of these
rengay and in June, 2007 had the pleasure of writing a
rengay with Betty (it ended up supporting 4 themes):
http://tinyurl.com/yoyo85
Haijin John McDonald (Rengay #35):
John McDonald is a retired stone-mason living in Edinburgh
Scotland. After some years of writing poetry in Scots (one
of the languages native to Scotland, the other being the
celtic rooted Gaelic)) he became interested in haiku in
the mid-1990's, and has been devoted to writing only that
since. He has a web-page of
Scots haiku
which he updates daily.
Around the time that the Masago haiku blog got started,
John and Masago began leaving comments on each other's
haiku blogs and have enjoyed each other's work since.
Writing a rengay together for this series was an obvious
extension of these poetic experiences.
J. Andrew Lockhart (Rengay #39):
J. Andrew Lockhart is the author of "Tangled in Wisteria"
and has had work published in three countries in books and
journals, such as Modern English Tanka, American Tanka,
Haiku Harvest, Magnapoets, Fire Pearls, and
Eucalypt. He
lives in Van Buren, Arkansas, with his wife and their four
children. Among other things, including teaching music, he
spends time with photography as a hobby.
Andrew writes a Haiku blog,
Past Tense.
Andrew's Photo blog
is
Present Tense.
Andrew and Masago regularly leave comments on each other's
haiku blogs. It was therefore a pleasure when Andrew
agreed to write this last Spring rengay in our "Rengay
Through the Seasons" series.
Haijin Hortensia Anderson (Rengay #44):
Hortensia Anderson lives in the east village in nyc, usa.
She took workshops at ABC NO RIO with Dorothy Friedman
August and with many poets at the St. Mark's Poetry
Project including Bernadette Mayer, Maureen Owen, and
Allen Ginsberg.
She loves haibun, edits the haibun column for "moonset,
the newspaper", and maintains a blog with monthly entries:
The
Plenitude of Emptiness.
She derives the most satisfaction from collaborations.
the timelessness
of cyberspace—
we birth a poem
Hortensia and Masago have collaborated on numerous poetic
projects in the past couple of years. Hortensia was one of the
first who supported the idea of undertaking this "Rengay
Through the Seasons project".
Haijin Zhanna P. Rader (Rengay #48):
Zhanna P. Rader is a Russian living in the USA with a
degree in Library Science. She writes and translates a
variety of poetry and short stories equally in Russian and
in English, including poems for children, sonnets,
limericks, haiku, and tanka. She has been published in
both languages since the mid-1980's, also winning numerous
poetry contests. She is the moderator of the WHCrussian
Internet Russian haiku forum and a former President of the
Athens, Georgia, Branch of National League of American Pen
Women.
Masago met Zhanna via the Simply Haiku Yahoo forum in
discussions about the Bird and Sea haiku series:
http://haikuworkshop.pbwiki.com/BirdHaiku
http://haikuworkshop.pbwiki.com/TheSeaAndItsHarbours
Since then Masago and Zhanna have written numerous rengay,
renku, and renhai together. They also regularly consult
with each other on their haiku writing projects.
Haijin Gary Gay (Rengay #52):
Garry Gay was born in Glendale, California in 1951. He
received his B.P.A. degree in photography in 1974 and has
been a professional photographer for the past 33 years.
Gary started writing haiku in 1975 and was greatly
influenced by Basho's Narrow Road To The Deep North. He
has steadily written haiku ever since.
He is one of the co-founders of the Haiku Poets of
Northern California and became their first president in
1989 and again served as president between 2001-2008. As
president in 1989 he founded the "Two Autumns" haiku
reading series. In 1991 he was elected president of the
"Haiku Society of America". In 1991 he co-founded "Haiku
North America". In 1996 he also co-founded the "American
Haiku Archives" in Sacramento, California. He is the
creator of the poetic form called "Rengay" and is the
author of several works including: The Billboard Cowboy,
The Silent Garden, Wings of Moonlight, River Stones,
Along The Way. The work The Unlocked Gate was recently
been published with John Thompson. Gary currently lives in
the California wine country in a small town called Windsor
with his wife Melinda and daughter Alissa.
Gary mantains a
photography web site.
Gary's online haiku book
is
The
Long Way Home.
When Masago started writing Haiku in 2005 he had heard of
Gary Gay as being the creator of the Rengay form. When
planning this one-year project of "Rengay Through the
Seasons" it was thought it would be appropriate to have a
rengay written with Gary. When he replied to the
affirmative it seemed appropriate and an honour that this
last rengay in the project be written with him.
