Haiku for Healing Interview – Julie Bloss Kelsey

Haiku for Healing is an initiative of The Haiku Foundation (THF) examining the therapeutic potentials and benefits of haiku. It includes interviews, articles and courses to explore how does its innate brevity and focus on the “now” empower poets, both experienced and new to this short form, to what Kafka called descend “into the cold abyss of oneself” and articulate dark and harrowing experiences and thoughts.

Continuing the Interview feature of Haiku for Healing we look at how Julie Bloss Kelsey addresses PTSD through the lens of haiku and its related short forms.

First of all, thank you, Julie for drawing my attention to your book which deals with themes addressed in this Haiku for Healing project. And thank you too for agreeing to be interviewed. You have a science background, what is it about haiku and its related literary short forms in particular that appeals to you?

For me, scientific observations involve documentation in a way that feels similar to writing haiku. When I worked as a site assessor for hazardous waste, for example, one of the first things I did on a site visit was to sketch a rough map of the property and jot down my observations about field conditions. In haiku, the map is the shape of the poem and I place my sensory observations within it.

Currently, I’m taking classes in natural history field studies. If you follow me on social media, you know that I like taking pictures of flowers and butterflies. Writing a haiku about a butterfly is just another way for me to take a picture, to preserve an observation.

Your book, Grasping the Fading Light: A Journey through PTSD includes both haiku and tanka. Would you say that it is these very forms that enabled you to tackle such a difficult subject?

Yes and no. I didn’t set out to write a book about PTSD. I started writing haiku in 2009, after the birth of my third child. Haiku was a way for me to have a little space to myself, a way to document and process what I was experiencing at the time. I liked writing to prompts, and I found myself intrigued by Rowan Beckett’s submission calls for grittier work, first as co-editor of Scryptic and later, with their journal #FemkuMag. I began to explore darker topics without realizing at the time where that might lead.

frayed rope
the last of my emotions
betrays me *1

Around 2019 or so, I looked at all of the short poetry I had published and realized that my work largely fell into three categories: sweet parenting poems, dark explorations of trauma, and a bulk of pieces that I thought of as “my pensive collection.” The parenting poems found their way into my first chapbook, The Call of Wildflowers (Title IX Press, 2020). When I looked at the poetry I had left, I realized that the remainder—both pensive and overtly about trauma—were about my healing journey with PTSD.  That’s when I put together Grasping the Fading Light (Sable Books, 2023).

So, to answer your question: yes, writing haiku and tanka did allow for greater healing, but I was taking that healing journey regardless. I just tried to be honest to the moment and explore what I was thinking and feeling through poetry. From a trauma lens, haiku gives me the framework to safely be open and present with my circumstances and feelings. I don’t have to dwell long enough to write an essay, but for this moment, in this poem, I can be emotionally and physically present.

How did these forms facilitate your writing about what is a complex and knotty issue?

I’ve never thought about it in this way before, but haiku and senryu have given me enough emotional distance to tackle some really hard truths:

the black mark
on my permanent record—
molestation *2

as if someone shot a hole in the (flashback) sun *3

damned if I do
damned if I don’t
trauma therapy *4

Tanka and kyoka give me more room to sort out and process my emotions after I’ve experienced them:

if I let go
the whole world
will fall to pieces . . .
shattered
snow globe *5

autumn sky—
the stars have drifted
far from home . . .
beneath my eyes
deep shadows *6

Please could you share a few other examples from your book.

I think my favorite poem in the book is this one:

every week the same
tangled branches outside
my therapist’s window *7

I had so much trouble figuring out where to put the line breaks, but I love that my confusion and frustration is reflected in the words. So often in therapy it feels like you are not moving, or you are just rehashing the same things over and over, that it can be hard to see your own growth.

The poem that I find the most painful in this collection is deceptively simple:

watching the geese fly
in and out of formation . . .
evening sky *8

The worst part of having repressed memories is that sense of alienation from your own life and from your perceived chain of memories. Which memories are real and which ones are painted-over façades? I remember sitting in a car watching the sky when I realized that I felt a kinship with the birds overhead—my memories were like a line of geese that couldn’t quite stay on track.

recovered memories
that no one believes—
my failed efforts
to piece myself
back together *9

Would you consider another collection of poems that touch on a painful and tough topic using haiku and its related forms?

I would, but I would be more prepared this time. There’s a vulnerability to publishing your work which is magnified when you collect all of these poems in one place. I didn’t realize just how hard it would be for me to promote this book. It’s been out in the world for two years already, and I’m just getting comfortable with that now.

What would you say to a poet looking to haiku as a healing tool?

Write for yourself. Write to explore, expend, purge, document. Don’t feel like you have to publish everything you write, and don’t publish any of it before you are ready. Take your time and be gentle with yourself. This is your healing journey.

Notes

*1. Scryptic, Issue 2.3, October 2018, Grasping the Fading Light, p. 17.

*2. #FemkuMag Issue 11, April 2019, Grasping the Fading Light, p. 18.

*3. Five Fleas, August 22, 2022.

*4. Prune Juice Journal, Issue 33, March 2021, Grasping the Fading Light, p. 10.

*5. Excerpt from Stacking Stones, An Anthology of Short Tanka Sequences, August 23, 2018, Grasping the Fading Light, p. 10.

*6. Excerpt from Stacking Stones, An Anthology of Short Tanka Sequences, August 23, 2018, Grasping the Fading Light, p. 6.

*7. Second Place, 23rd International “Kusamakura” Competition, 2018, Grasping the Fading Light, p. 13.

*8. Fresh Out, September 4, 2019, Grasping the Fading Light, p. 10.

*9. Scryptic, Issue 2.3, October 31, 2018, Grasping the Fading Light, p. 16.

Coming up on October 6: Our forthcoming feature on Monday 6th October is the Haiku for Healing Google Classroom course organised by renowned haiku poet and editor, Geethanjali Rajan.

If you have any questions about Haiku for Healing, please use the Haiku for Healing contact form on our Contact page.

Bios

Julie Bloss Kelsey’s 2023 poetry collection, Grasping the Fading Light: A Journey through PTSD won the 2021 Women’s International Haiku Contest from Sable Books. She also has two chapbooks of poetry: The Call of Wildflowers (Title IX Press, 2020) and After Curfew (Cuttlefish Books, 2023). Julie is the current Secretary of The Haiku Foundation and writes a bi-monthly column for new haiku poets called New to Haiku. You can find Julie on Instagram (@julieblosskelsey) and Bluesky (@mamajoules.bsky.social).

Sonam Chhoki finds the Japanese short-form poetry resonates with her Tibetan Buddhist upbringing. She is inspired by her father, Sonam Gyamtsho, the architect of Bhutan’s non-monastic modern education and by her mother, Chhoden Jangmu, who taught her: “Being a girl doesn’t mean you can’t do anything.” She is the principal editor, and co-editor of haibun for the online journal of Japanese short forms, cattails.

Her chapbook of haibun, The Lure of the Threshold was published in May 2021. Mapping Absences, a collaboration of haibun, tan bun and tanka prose with Mike Montreuil was published in 2019. Another collaboration with Geethanjali Rajan: Unexpected Gift was published in November 2021. She organised a year-long email course in 2024 for The Haiku Foundation’s Haiku for Parkinson’s project.

Read past Haiku for Healing posts here.

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