December 2018 Meeting
Post date: Dec 17, 2018 5:28:48 PM
Haiku Northwest’s last meeting of the year took place on Saturday, December 1, 2018. Eight of us first met for lunch at 11:30 a.m. at Vovito, which was right across from the Seattle Central Library branch where we held the meeting.
At 1:00 p.m., Michelle Schaefer chaired the meeting, in Paccar Room 5 on the fourth floor, with ten other people in attendance: David Berger, Gary Evans, Dianne Garcia, Katharine Grubb, Curtis Manley, Tanya McDonald, Bob Redmond, Sheila Sondik, Angela Terry, and Michael Dylan Welch. After we made introductions, our first order of business was to elect officers for 2019:
President: Tanya McDonald
Vice President: Michelle Schaefer
Secretary: Angie Terry
Treasurer (for the time being): Dianne Garcia
Webmaster: Michael Dylan Welch
Dianne passed around her 2018 financial report and answered questions (Haiku Northwest finances are very healthy), followed by announcements. Michael said that Curtis Manley had won the Washington State Book Award for his children’s picture book Shawn Loves Sharks. Michael is the current poet in residence for VALA Arts in Kirkland and he said that he would be presenting an ekphrastic writing workshop on December 8. Angie then mentioned that she had been selected as the Mann Library daily haiku poet for the month of December 2018. Michael also gave an update on the installation of haiku plaques for the Seabeck Haiku Walk, with installation scheduled for early in 2019.
Tanya brought up the idea of moving our meetings from the fourth Thursday to the second Thursday of the month, which gets us away from Thanksgiving and Christmas. Everyone present agreed, and so, starting in 2019, Haiku Northwest meetings will again be held on the second Thursday of the month (which used to be our regular meeting time).
Following the business part of the meeting, Michael discussed his visit to the 22nd annual haiku weekend in Hot Springs, Arkansas where he was the featured speaker in early November 2018, showing information about this resort town and discussing his presentations and other activities (some of which, such as weathergrams, had been influenced by Seabeck).
We then spent about an hour going through our regular critique session for everyone who had brought haiku to share, and then enjoyed a tan-renga writing exercise, with people choosing haiku from the handouts we had in front of us from the critique session and adding two-line capping verses. We then shared what we had written and chatted until it was time to vacate the meeting room.