March 31: Skinny Dipping (Prompted)

skinny dipping
the man in the moon
as shy as I am

.

(NaHaiWriMo prompt for March 31st, per Alan Summers: Skin )

______________________________

So you all know there was this thing called NaHaiWriMo back in February, right? National Haiku Writing Month? Where the participants were supposed to write a haiku every day in the month of February? And about a zillion people did this, and wrote some fantastic haiku, and a lot of them got their inspiration by following prompts cooked up and posted on Facebook by Michael Dylan Welch, the First Vice-President of the Haiku Society of America and NaHaiWriMo founder?

And everyone had so much fun that they begged and whined until Michael appointed Alan Summers, who is a founding editor of haijinx and the proprietor of Area 17 and does a whole lot of other exciting things with haiku, to continue to provide haiku prompts on the NaHaiWriMo Facebook page for the month of March? And tons of people kept following along and having all kinds of fun and no one really wanted the fun to end?

Well, to my shock and delight, Michael decided to ask me to keep all these NaHaiWriMo groupies happy by providing prompts for the month of April (which happens to be National Poetry Month). So if you have a Facebook account, and you haven’t already “liked” the NaHaiWriMo page (see link above), go do that now, please, and then my prompts will start showing up in your news feed, and if you want you can even write haiku inspired by them (or haiku not inspired by them) and post them on the NaHaiWriMo page and be part of this whole wild movement.

If you don’t have and don’t want a Facebook account, fear not, I will also be posting the prompts here after I post them on Facebook, so you can follow along. If you want, you can post haiku inspired by the prompts on your own blog, if you have one. Or you can post them in my comments, and let me know if you’d like me to post them on Facebook for you. (Just be forewarned that if you post haiku here [or usually on Facebook for that matter], most journals will consider them previously published and therefore ineligible for further publication — haijinx being one notable exception, yay us.)

Now, it’s true that I have not actually been following most of the NaHaiWriMo prompts myself, in the sense of, you know, writing haiku about the topics given. (I’m ornery that way. Also really busy.) But I have been following the results of the NaHaiWriMo prompts, and I find them fascinating and wonderful. All kinds of people who might not ordinarily write haiku regularly have been doing so. They’ve been challenged to write about things they might not ordinarily think to write about. They’ve demonstrated the vast variety of haiku it’s possible to write on a single topic. They’ve developed a camaraderie, started to build a community.

So I am thrilled to have the honor of contributing to this amazing movement. (Also, any idea how much fun it is to brainstorm a long crazy list of haiku prompts? Really fun.)

Look for my prompt for April 1st to appear late tonight. (In seventeen or eighteen hours from the time I posted this, that is, for those of you who are so inconsiderate as to live in drastically different time zones from me.) See you then.