The Monthly talks short form poetry with Roberta Beary – Part 3 – On writers, poets, writing and the role of an editor

You not only write haiku, you edit haiku journals?

After being a finalist in those awards I mentioned earlier, I was approached by the Haiku Society of America (HSA) to edit their yearly anthology. I brought in poet, Ellen Compton, and we co-edited the 2006 HSA members’ anthology, “Fish in Love”. It later won an award.

In 2008 the selected HSA anthology’s volunteer editors withdrew as editors. They left the finances in a mess, undeposited cheques lying around, so I took over editing the anthology and I again asked Ellen Compton to join as co-editor. We were both happy to jump in to give back to the haiku community. The anthology, “Dandelion Clocks”, also won an award.

Since 2013 I have been the haibun editor for Modern Haiku, which is often ranked as the best English-language haiku journal.

How did you get work as an editor of Modern Haiku?

I am a great believer in asking for things. I don’t believe you should wait to get things handed to you. As I mentioned earlier, I had been asked to edit a journal after I had won a prize with my first collection. But that journal folded and I wrote to the Modern Haiku editor and asked if they needed a haibun editor. They said they would think about it and a few weeks later they contacted me and I was offered the ‘job’.

You worked at your craft and then you sought out the position of editor?

It is one of the things I just don’t get with writers. They get nominated for a prize, or they win one haiku prize and they think they should produce a collection or get a job as an editor. The first couple of prizes I won back in 2005 or 2007, I approached those wins as if they were flukes. I thought the planets aligned just that one time and I was going to go back to getting rejections.

I get people writing to me asking to teach them how to write the kind of poetry that they can get published in this or that journal. I tell them that writing is something you need to work at for a long time. You also need to not let rejections bother you, not take them personally.

Sometimes my editor gets letters complaining about me rejecting their haibun, and they say they are cancelling their subscription. In that case, they are depriving themselves of the opportunity to learn.

Regarding your role as editor you seem to be committed to the demand for rigour and craft from contributors?

There have been comments that haibun is trending in many MFA (Masters of Fine Arts)  graduate programs in poetry. Often these graduate students understand two basics of haibun: the prose and the title. But often the haibun’s haiku are terrible. I’ve talked to quite a few editors, not just of haiku journals, but mainstream journals, and they are finding that a lot of the haibun submissions they receive from graduate students are not very impressive.

I do occasionally try to help poets. I will work with them to tighten up the haibun, either the prose, which needs work, or the haiku which could be stronger. Some of the time, I find people have the bones of a good piece of work, it’s 85 per cent there, but it just needs some attention. I will help people one time.

Often people ask for feedback, and generally I don’t do that because then you see submissions which are slightly amended based on the feedback in other journals.

Sometimes people will send me their work ahead of a submission period and ask me to look it over and offer them suggestions. I don’t like that, in fact that would put you on my bad list. It is just not something you should do to an editor. The submission playing field should be equal for all.

Some of my friends are the most egregious offenders and I have had to say to people this is too much of a conflict of interest, I just can’t look at your work. It is a question of my credibility on the line, so I just cannot do that and no-one should expect me to.

What about offering general ideas to help poets?

I did co-write a book, Haibun – A Writer’s Guide (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2023) which goes through the rudiments of what you need to do to understand and write haibun, and in that book, beyond the resources regarding the writing, it does suggest that you not complain to the editor, not question their decisions about declining your work.

Is there a tension between you the writer and your work as an editor?

I write haiku and submit them to Paul Miller who is the editor of Modern Haiku and I do get rejected. I get rejected quite frequently from many places. A rule I follow is to never put my own haibun in Modern Haiku. I would have a problem with any editor who publishes their own work in a journal they edit. If you put your own work in your journal, then someone else’s work wasn’t selected. You have an advantage as editor and you cannot maintain your credibility if you, as editor, select your own work.

Do you enjoy editing?

I enjoy working as an editor. One of the problems of being an editor is that you have to fight the desire to start edit other’s work to suit your individual style.

Do you offer any advice to writers?

I used to write to people when I was an editor and suggest they “dig deeper” and they would ask me what that meant. I wanted them to take risks with their writing; they were too restrained. I thought they should expose them-selves more so that the work will resonate with the reader. I felt they were writing too much as an outside observer.

Readers can see when it’s just wordplay, or you are adding surprise twists, or you are being cute with words. They can see when you are just doing things for effect. You can also see that the writer is willing to go so far but they are not willing to go any further. I don’t think restraint makes for good work.

As an illustration of what I’m talking about, I can remember taking a class, when I was working full-time and raising my children, at The Writers’ Centre. It was a night time class, 6pm to 7.30pm, something like that, with this writer Stanley Plumly, a very well published writer in the United States. And he said he had always written the same poem his entire life. It was about his father being an alcoholic and how that impacted his family, and it was just variations on that theme.

He talked about writing being like an overexposed negative, and you should hold up a mirror to that image, and that is what your poem should be. I still have my notes from that class, and when people write to me saying that I have written too much about my family, about my mother’s death, or about my father’s death, and they advise me to move on, I just can’t take this to heart. As I said, you have to “dig deeper”.

So writers should be less restrained. Anything else?

You write the story you need to write, it’s not about what pleases an editor, or what is trending. I get asked why I write so much about being gay when I am not gay, although I do identify as gender fluid, neither male nor female. I write these poems for my son, who is gay, and for his friends, so that they know they are not alone. My son had friends from secondary school who killed themselves because their parents didn’t accept their child was gay.

My son went through a really hard time with his dad when he came out when he was 15. It was horrible and I was really worried for him. I just tried to be really supportive.

I try to be supportive of the disenfranchised; groups that feel they can’t speak up, or people who feel they have been silenced,

Any other advice to writers?

The final thing I would say would be don’t use a partner, a child, or anyone in your family as a sounding board. They will either gush about your work or be overly critical and neither is useful.

In terms of your own writing, are you a whittler or do you create ready-mades?

I am definitely a whittler. I might be an over whittler. I have once in a while written a haiku that I haven’t edited, but I’ve written over 500 haiku over 25 years and that has probably happened three times. That is incredibly ra-re. I spend months, sometimes years, working on a haiku. I always say to people who are starting out writing haiku, join a group because workshop-ping is incredibly valuable.

What I do now, is that when I think it’s ready, whatever piece of writing it is, I use on my IPad, an editing function for Pages which has a feature called Speech. It plays back your writing in a computerised voice, and I listen to it. I will listen to the work and see if anything feels clunky or there are words or phrases which don’t quite fit.