HAIKU DIALOGUE – Wanderlust – Staying Home

Wanderlust with Guest Editor Marietta McGregor

Toddlers live in the present. Family forms the boundaries of their small world. It’s only as we grow up that we start to dream and plan to be somewhere else, to experience something new. Many writers have woven narratives around their travels. Hans Christian Andersen believed that to travel is to live. Aesop maintained that adventure is worthwhile. Do you have favourite travel tales you trot out to family and friends? I certainly do. They tell me they enjoy them, but I wonder if they’re just being polite. Travel is personal, after all. It’s what you alone see and how it makes you feel. Call it wanderlust or what you will, the urge to experience something new and different has long captured our imaginations. I’d like our first prompt to be about real-life journeys as you coddiwomple along, enjoying the trip while perhaps not knowing the destination. Prompt 2 will relate more to how we travel in our minds, whether it’s to the past, the future, or to some fictional realm we conjure up that feels very real.

Prompt: Staying home – traveling in our mind/through books/virtual travel/reliving past journeys

“Man’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (1809–1894)

The German language has a word for the ache or longing for distant places we’ve never visited – fernweh, or “far-sickness”. Researchers such as Endel Tulving (1985) coined the term “mental time travel” for our ability to use overlapping brain networks to relive past events, project ourselves into the future, or use our imagination to create fictitious places and happenings, both past and future. Humans are not unique in having this trait – some birds and mammals also possess the ability to recall past events, and even to imagine possible future ones, which harks back to our shared evolutionary roots as creatures able to move. Mental time travel is like telling a story. We may use this skill quite consciously to relive past journeys, or we can let our minds wander, letting our thoughts settle where they will. As you time travel at home, I look forward to joining you through your haiku.

The deadline is midnight Eastern Standard Time, Saturday, November 7th, 2026.

Please use the Haiku Dialogue submission form below to enter one or two original unpublished haiku inspired by the week’s theme, and then press Submit to send your entry. (The Submit button will not be available until the Name, Email, and Place of Residence fields are filled in.) In the Poem box, with your poem(s), please include any special formatting requirements & your name & residence as you would like it to appear in the column. Please note that by submitting, you agree that your work may appear in the column – neither acknowledgment nor acceptance emails will be sent. All communication about the poems that are posted in the column will be added as blog comments.

Join us next week for Marietta’s selection of poems on the topic of Staying Home…

Bios:

Guest editor Marietta McGregor is a retired Tasmanian botanist and journalist who has made her home between Canberra and the scenic south coast of New South Wales for over four decades. A lover of the natural world since childhood, she went on to study biological sciences, and has worked as palynologist, garden designer, science journalist, editor, university tutor, education manager, and grants developer for the national wildlife collection. Her haiku, haibun and haiga have been widely published, have won awards and appear in anthologies.

Assistant Editor Lafcadio, a former teacher, now works from home writing, editing and proofreading study guides for nursing textbooks. She lives in Tennessee. She has written poetry for a long time but a couple of years ago fell in love with Japanese micropoetry and hasn’t looked back. Lafcadio has been published in a number of journals and anthologies. She writes under the nom de plume of Lafcadio because nom de plume is so fun to say. You can read her poems on Twitter (X) @lafcadiopoetry or BlueSky @lafcadiobsky.

Assistant Editor Vandana Parashar is an associate editor of haikuKATHA and one of the editors of Poetry Pea and #FemkuMag. Her debut e-chapbook, I Am, was published by Title IX Press (now Moth Orchid Press) in 2019 and her second chapbook Alone, I Am Not, was published by Velvet Dusk Publishing in April 2022.

Lori Zajkowski is the Post Manager for Haiku Dialogue. She lives in New York City and enjoys reading and writing haiku.

Managing Editor Katherine Munro lives in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, and publishes under the name kjmunro. She served as Membership Secretary for Haiku Canada for ten years, and her debut poetry collection is contractions (Red Moon Press, 2019). Find her at: kjmunro1560.wordpress.com.

Portrait by Laurel Parry

THF strives to maintain a safe and friendly environment for our readers and site participants. Participation in our offerings assumes respectful and appropriate behavior of all parties. We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone, for any reason, at any time.

If you see something you feel may violate our Code of Conduct, please report it to the appropriate moderator or the President here.

Please note that all poems & images appearing in Haiku Dialogue may not be used elsewhere without express permission – copyright is retained by the creators. Please see our Copyright Policies.

Photo Credits:

Banner Photo & Prompt Photo credits: Marietta McGregor

Haiku Dialogue offers a triweekly prompt for practicing your haiku. Posts appear each Wednesday with a prompt or a selection of poems from a previous week. Read past Haiku Dialogue posts here.