The last few months, I’ve been taking classes that combine poetry and visuals. I’ve been learning about poetry comics, concrete poetry, erasure poems (aka black-out poems), and most recently, visual haiku. The classes are through The Writer’s Center, and are taught by Marianne Murphy.

Over the past two years, I’ve felt the part of me that loves to write entering into a bit of a battle with the part of me that’s discovered a love for making marks and shapes, playing with colors and creating images. 

Intellectually, I know that there are many ways to combine words and images, and I’ve experimented with many of them: info-graphics, sketch-notes, visual journals, comics, diagrams, mind maps, powerpoints. But visual poems have really clicked for me. They feel like coming home.

These images are from our assignment to write haiku. We were to answer questions about where we were, what we saw, smelled, heard, and what was beneath and above us.

Then, consider our emotions – what were we feeling at the time. We also were advised to consider the season we were in, because haiku often refer to the season. Once we wrote the haiku, we were to take each line and create an image. 

These are some of the haiku I created while enjoying my time at Oakland Feather River Camp, a camp created in 1924 to be a refuge for the children and families of Oakland.

This was my third year there – my sweetheart and his son have been going for 19 plus years. It is a family tradition. And sadly, the fires that are burning in Plumas County are threatening this oasis.