A literary stroll through the four seasons – Kyoto Encounters (1995) has to be one of the most attractive English-language collections ever produced about the city. Edited by J. Thomas Rimer (Professor Emeritus at Pittsburgh University and author of several books), it combines visual beauty in commissioned photos with extracts culled from the corpus of …Read More
Author: John Dougill (Page 41 of 45)
Hailstone Haiku Circle (by Stephen Gill) Under the boots of marching soldiers sparkle of new-green grass – (Keiko Yurugi, from Hailstones, 2001) Hailstone Haiku Circle was founded by Stephen Gill (haiku name ‘Tito’) in 2000 in the Kansai region of Japan for poets writing haiku in English. It comprises largely haiku students (all adults; …Read More
Cooling off by the River at Shijo (1690) By Jeff Robbins, Compiler of the Basho4Now Trilogy The custom Basho describes in the following haibun and haiku began in the late 12th century as part of the Gion Festival; a temporary bridge was set up for portable shrines to cross the Kamo River near …Read More
From our friends at Kyoto Journal comes news of an exciting new publication… Robert Brady, one of the founders of KJ, has contributed to almost every issue — his voice and the magazine’s co-evolving over the years. Since April 2002 he has maintained an almost daily net presence at Pure Land Mountain, with well over …Read More
Interview with Jeff Robbins, compiler of the Basho4Now Trilogy *************************** Why “Basho4Now”? This is not Basho4Scholars, but rather Basho for EVERYONE — not knowledge of Japanese literature, but rather knowledge of humanity will help you unlock the Basho works in this trilogy. Basho4Now is the hundreds upon hundreds of fascinating and humane Basho works the …Read More
At our upcoming WiK event on October 11, we’ll be hosting two Davids – one a non-fiction writer and the other a novelist. Information about David Joiner has already appeared; now we have a sneak preview of what might be on offer by David Duff, a founding member of WiK and our social organiser. …Read More
Matsuo Basho (1644-94) is hardly associated with Kyoto. With the Deep North, of course. And with Edo too, where he had his home. Indeed, he took his pen-name from the plantain-tree (basho) which stood outside his hut there. Yet the poet-wanderer had close connections with the ancient capital. He was born not far away, in …Read More
David Joiner was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. He attended Earlham College and majored in Japanese Studies. During his junior year he made his first trip to Asia – a five-month study abroad program in Sapporo, Japan. Nine years and several trips to Asia later he earned his MFA from the University of Arizona …Read More
Margaret Chula’s Grinding My Ink (1993) is a collection of haiku mostly written while living in Kyoto in the 1980s and 1990s. It won the Haiku Society of America Book Award. ‘Nearly all my memories of Japan center around a ramshackle wooden house on the northern edge of Kyoto,’ she writes. She lived in the house …Read More
Kyoto Writing Competition
WiK Anthologies
The Nature of Kyoto (2023)
Eds. Lisa Twaronite Sone & Robert Weis
Foreword by Pico Iyer
Structures of Kyoto (2021)
Eds: Rebecca Otowa & Karen Lee Tawarayama
Foreword by Judith Clancy
Encounters with Kyoto (2019)
Eds: Jann Williams & Ian Josh Yates
Foreword by Juliet Winters Carpenter
Echoes (2017)
Eds: John Dougill, Amy Chavez, & Mark Richardson
Preface by Alex Kerr
Recent Comments