Haiku for Healing Interview – Rebecca Drouilhet

In this H4H interview Rebecca Drouilhet shares how haiku is an important part of her efforts to build resilience and heal not only on a personal level but also to repair and ameliorate the world through kindness and goodwill.

Thank you, Rebecca, for participating in this interview feature of Haiku for Healing. You’re a widely published poet of haiku and the other Japanese short forms. How did you come to write haiku?

My mother taught intellectually gifted children in Ohio where haiku was part of the curriculum. In midlife, I rediscovered my love for haiku via haiku books for sale at Barnes and Noble in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. When our family returned to Mississippi, I ordered a copy of the 25th Anniversary Edition of The Haiku Handbook by Professor William J. Higginson and his beautiful wife Penny Harter. I had also studied at USM and realized there that I loved to write. After joining a local writers’ group, I began to teach them haiku and, with the support of the group, gave and judged a local haiku contest. I was malcontent with how I had judged the contest and reached out to Jim Kacian to help me increase my knowledge base. He enrolled me in the haiku forum at The Haiku Foundation where I began to write haiku and submit my work to outside editors thanks to the encouragement of my fellow poets there. I also joined AHA poetry owned and operated by Jane Reichhold, where I later served at her request as a haiku moderator, a role that continued on after her death at Inkstone Poetry, an online site formed by many of her former students to honor her and her vision of an international poetry forum for students of all ability levels. But basically, I write haiku because I love haiku and have since I was a child.

You have a medical background as a registered nurse. Would you say that your professional experience of caring for the well-being of the patients made you more aware of the therapeutic potentials of a short form like haiku? If you have written haiku inspired by your experience as a nurse, please could you share a couple of poems.

As a nurse, I saw the best and the worst of humanity. The suffering, the poverty, the pain and the transcendence of the human spirit through it all. Some would go home and some would face the end of life. I was their teacher, their nurse, their advocate and their caregiver. But always, they taught me more. I use what life taught me through their experiences and my own to develop a resilience that allows healing to come.

in remission…
beyond the bare branches
winter stars *1

watching it
become something else…
spring cloud *2

Since you first wrote haiku, have the main motifs and the tenor of your poems changed? Please could you expand a little on this.

At first, I wrote almost exclusively my concrete observations of the flowers and fauna of my home in the country, considering this a type of spiritual journey as I pursued what I thought was ‘the way of haiku’. Today, I open my heart and mind more, have a less rigid and dogmatic idea of life and haiku form, although I still believe, no matter what the style, that that small intuitive leap that arcs between parts of the haiku, what R.H. Blythe called ‘satori’ or the small enlightenment, lies at the heart of truly great haiku.

I also use the concepts articulated by Haruo Shirane (Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory and the Poetry of Basho) where Shirane outlines and explains the use of the horizontal and vertical axis of haiku, with the horizontal axis being the concrete element of the haiku, and the vertical axis being the metaphorical or historical element that expands the concrete moment to connect it with the endless expanse of the universe and of human affairs as is apparent in Basho’s poem:

summer grasses
all that’s left
of warriors’ dreams *3

This haiku was composed by Basho at the site of an ancient, historically significant battlefield. It was this haiku and Shirane’s influence which provided the catalyst for change and growth in my own haiku philosophy.

Is there a theme, a place or a person that you return to, time and again, in your haiku? Could you please share a few examples.

Yes. The ancestors, the stars, the subtle gifts of each season – the moons, the blossoms, turning leaves and snowflakes – the sea in its various moods, and the achingly beautiful transience of life that yet persists, in my mind, as each small moment lasting forever. The Eastern concept of The Eternal Moment, I suppose, in some ways.

darting shadows…
a dragonfly skims the lilies
at summer’s end *4

will this be the year
I stop counting them…
autumn stars *5

The Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival, the Golden Contest, Washington, D.C and the Small Wonders Haiku Contest are international events at which you have won awards. How have such successes shaped your haiku writing?

Each time I feel deeply honoured and awed to be included among some of the most talented poets and literary artists on the planet. I must admit, though, that that kind of recognition went to my head at first and negatively affected the quality of my writing. But now I remind myself each time that ego destroys art, that I need to stay humble and forever in a ‘beginner’s mind’, for we are only as good as our last poem. The focus must remain on the work itself. I also aim to create an ageless or timeless feel in my poems – themes and ideas that draw on recurring universals in both human reality and the natural world – and many of my winning poems exemplified this.

How have you incorporated haiku as a healing practice? Do you write regularly? Or do you write in response to a specific event, either personal or an issue that has arisen in the public domain?

I write regularly in a wide range of forms and on myriad topics, but haiku remains my first love. After my mother’s death, I used haiku and tanka to get my feelings out. I am deeply introverted and don’t enjoy or get much relief from simply talking things out. I also employed haiku to help me heal from breast cancer, the traumatic death of my much-loved daughter-in-law, Allison, and to cope with and heal when I lost my husband of many years suddenly and unexpectedly in September 2024. This healing is still in process. I do write about public events and environmental and social challenges such as the ills of poverty and the need for compassion and positive intervention in addressing our most challenging human and environmental concerns by taking individual responsibility with each of our small lives to help heal them as much as we can. To reach out to those who are sick or suffering, not only to help them heal, but to help heal the terrible malady of our age – the indifference to the suffering, misery and vulnerability in our societies – and to find within the courage to oppose evil in ourselves and others. This follows closely the Jewish philosophy of tikkun olam, our personal obligation to help repair and heal the world through kindness, humanitarianism and community service.

red wood bridge
even while they’re falling
the blossoms touch *6

first autumn alone
the widow walks into
darkening crimson *7

What would you say to a poet who is looking to haiku as a therapeutic exercise?

Listen to the quiet. Learn to trust yourself, and in my philosophy, the divine spark in yourself and others and in the Divine Power. Observe the beauty and pain in the world around you. Learn to accept life, love, pain, change and renewal as necessary teachers. Don’t force the healing. Open yourself with honesty and truth. Let it come to you. And, when it does, embrace it.

winter moon…
and yet
these magnolia blossoms *8

Kintai Bridge
the shadows of lovers
come and go *9

Notes

*1.  A Hundred Gourds, June 2016.
*2.  Modern Haiku, Issue 46.1.
*3.  The Essential Haiku, Edited and with verse translations by Robert Hass, copyright 1994, Harper Collins Publisher.
*4.  A Hundred Gourds, March 2015.
*5.  cattails April 2017. Editor’s Choice. Also appeared in NeverEndingStory’s Haiku Anthology, 2017.
*6.  Golden Haiku, Golden Triangle Haiku Contest, Washington D.C. Business District, 2024. Poster display.
*7.  When A Sparrow Falls: Reflections on Life, Death and Love, copyright 2025, author Rebecca Drouilhet. Blue Willow Press, editing and AI bookcover by Dana Gittings.
*8.  The Lakeview Journal of Literature and Art, Issue #2, August 2013.
*9.  When A Sparrow Falls: Reflections on Life, Death and Love, copyright 2025, author Rebecca Drouilhet. Blue Willow Press, editing and AI bookcover by Dana Gittings.

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

Coming up on Monday, 29th June:

In this H4H interview, tackling the themes of death, war, dislocation and cruelty, Sean O’Connor, award-winning poet, and editor says that writing is not so much a therapeutic working through of his own personal feelings as it is of creating a connection, a conversation with the reader. The therapeutic benefits are at the discretion of the reader.

Bios

Rebecca Drouilhet is an oft-published poet who writes haiku, tanka, haibun and tanka prose, and who has won many prizes, awards and accolades over the years. She has self-published 4 books in these forms, appeared on Drifting Sands Ripples podcast and has been tanka poet of the month on Triveni Haikai.

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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