This was my first session as Director and we had a small but interesting group of people. They ranged from such diverse places such as the USA, India, Turkey, Australia, New Zealand and Palestine.

Anil, from Turkey, was doubly challenged as he was writing in a foreign language.  Most people find haiku in their own tongue challenging, so he did exceptionally well. Lorin from Australia won a major Australian haiku competition during the duration of the class.  Sadly, we cannot claim any credit as it closed before we started. Kamesh, from India, taught us about his culture in his haiku. Isa (Palestine) and John (United States) taught us some grammar and also explained some poetic points along the way. Kathy from New Zealand also shared something of her country and had to leave just before the class ended to visit Nepal. Hopefully the beauty and grandeur inspired her to come home with bulging notebooks.

We had several interesting discussions along the way and shared many interesting links. Ami, Pearl and Harriot, all from the United States joined us for a time, but life outside haiku sometimes has to take precedence. My Co-mentor, Carole did a brilliant job backing me up, and Co-Mentor, DeVar provided an excellent exercise on 'fragment-phrase' technique.

To warm things up for the first week or so, I devised what may be a new form of haiku… the “frankenku”…built from bits and pieces, and it produced some interesting results. Each person provided an initial line, then added a second line to somebody else’s line # 1, and the 3rd line to a different set of lines 1 and 2;  so each haiku was “created” by three people! - Sue