Reay Jespersen

One day it’s nice out.
The next, snow and freezing rain.
March in Toronto.

I discovered the classic form of Japanese poetry called Haiku many years back, and have thoroughly enjoyed using it time and again since. Alex Truman and Mike Walker, two long-time friends of mine, began getting into it as well, and it has played at least two key roles in our collective lives since then. Mike was Alex’s Best Man and I was a groomsman, and the notion was put forth for each of us manly men to do a haiku as part of our speech during the reception dinner. It went over very well.

Cut to several years later, when my (now) wife and I were having our own wedding, and decided that in order to get us to kiss at the reception, guests would have to write and recite a haiku. They ranged from heartwarming to hilarious, and we were pleasantly surprised at how well the idea was received and, clearly, enjoyed.

I’ve been toying with the idea for some time of writing a haiku-a-day-type desk calendar, which has always gone under the working title of “Haiku - Gesundheit!” Problems with the idea coming to fruition ranged from not being able to hit on the right tone for it (should all of them be off-beat? Funny? Serious? A mix? Would someone really want a funny haiku one day and one proverbially singing the blues the next?) to not being able to focus on it enough to get any significant volume of material produced. Let me tell you, folks, a year can seem to go by pretty quickly, but not when you’re trying to crank out 365 quality poems for one.

In any case, I opted just this morning to add a new category on this new site, which would bear the name of the (umpteenth) backburner project. Should anything ever come of it in the wide world of publishing, all the better. But I figured that either way, there’s no reason the idea shouldn’t see the light of day in the mean time.

I intend, for the time being, to simply number them as I post them. More than anything, that’s simply in lieu of a proper title, which for whatever reason I don’t think haiku should be expected to have. Giving a haiku a title seems to me to almost be adding another line to the traditional (English) three, which feels like a bit of a cheat. Titles also encapsulate what (or who) the written piece is about, and titling it “The Cherry Blossom Tree In The Backyard” and then writing three lines about the cherry blossom tree in the backyard seems a bit silly. Putting a title on a haiku either states the obvious, or gives information to the reader which they’re intended to discover for themselves through the reading of the poem. Just my take on it, of course.

In any case, to hope you get as much enjoyment out of reading them as I do out of writing them would be entirely too much to expect - I have a lot of fun writing, to say the least - but I certainly hope you like them. And whether you do or not, I encourage you to leave a comment about them, and be brutally honest about your impressions. I won’t get better as a writer unless I know what works, but perhaps even more importantly, what doesn’t.

Barry Sanders is a friend of mine who’s got various and sundry things going on in his life at any one time, and each one he adds himself is invariably creative.

His latest thing was to construct a poor man’s stedicam device, literally constructed out of material you can buy at home renovation stores, for his video camera. While the point of the device is actually for a larger project he has in mind (for which he’s going to Amsterdam next month; my creative notions have taken me as far as downtown, while Barry’s takes him to the other side of the world), he wanted to give it a small scale test run to see how it, and his various audio equipment, worked together.

He approached me and asked if I’d be up for writing a short monologue script, and either act it out in front of his camera, or get someone else to do so. A few days later, I’d written a couple of monologues, and a few days after that, we’d decided upon which one to use.

Problem being, while we were initially going to shoot the thing a couple of weekends ago, I asked to put it off a week due to unexpectedly late hours at work, and the lack of prep time that left me with. Then we were going to shoot it yesterday, but Barry discovered a problem with one of his mics which has to be dealt with before the bit can be shot properly.

Hopefully we’ll have a chance to shoot it this upcoming weekend, though with plans already made for the bulk of it, the window of opportunity is relatively small.

Fingers crossed.

Just wanted to send out a huge thank you to Shaun Hatton (aka Shatton) for a) routinely lighting a fire under my ass to do something with my website and b) being the one to make that website happen.

Shaun is one of those guys - you likely know the kind yourself - who knows far more about the web and the way to make it work than you ever will. While I sincerely hope to take over such duties some day (at least so far as my own site goes), he always puts up with my sudden whims for a website without complaint, and always, as you can see with a quick look around this text, with a flare for the cool.

Many thanks again, Shaun. Here’s hoping I keep up with it this time.

Canadian jazz legend Jeff Healy succumbed to cancer yesterday in a Toronto hospital. He will be missed by music fans around the world.

Tracy, an aspiring writer friend of mine, has recently challenged me to take on the exercise put forth by one of the writing groups she belongs to: write a minimum of 100 words per day for 100 days. You can’t write 200 words one day and then take the next day off; what you do on any day only counts toward that day’s total. And if you ever miss a day, the 100 days starts over again.

I thought it was an interesting challenge, and as some may know, I’ve enjoyed numerous writing challenges (typically self-imposed) over the years, so I was quite happy to accept hers. Thus far, now I guess heading into my third week (give or take - I’ve got it written down somewhere specifically so I don’t have to keep the specifics in mind all the time), I’ve kept it up. And not only am I getting more writing done than I normally would, given my tendency is to wait to be struck by both inspiration and the time to write - which can probably be chalked up to most writers’ penchants for procrastination - but I’m finding that the process of writing is in itself giving me more ideas.

I’m normally hit with ideas pretty routinely. I’ve got an ever-growing collection of small notebooks to jot down ideas when they occur to me, to the point where if I had every day to myself to write, I still couldn’t hope to use all of them. But this regular process of writing every day - which is of course supposed to get you into the very habit of writing every day - helps to lubricate my imagination even more. So I’m not only enjoying meeting Tracy’s challenge head-on, but also the work it’s accomplishing, as well as the more cohesive ideas I’m getting from the process. My wife had articulated it best a few days ago, saying it was nice to see that the ideas I’m getting now are more complete and usable, rather than the notions for lone characters or scenes or coo character names or other tidbits I’m typically struck with. It would seem that creativity begets creativity.

Awesome.

Hi. This is Shaun Hatton posting to Reay Jespersen’s site. I’m doing this because I have just destroyed Reay’s site (at his request, of course) and I need to have some sort of post up here now.

Reay, when you see this, give me a call. It’s all yours to do with it what you will.

- Shaun