About

I count syllables. I have counted them by hand for as long as I have written, and I keep the count the way a sonnet keeps its fourteen lines — not as a cage, but as a shape to press against.

What I make is haiga, and the two halves of it came to me from opposite ends of the earth.

The word came from Iowa.

There is a real line of haiku running through the small college where I studied — Loras, in Dubuque — beginning with the priest-poet Raymond Rosaliep, once called the John Donne of Western haiku. I arrived the year after he died and studied under his student and close friend Bill Pauly, the keeper of his workshop. Rosaliep to Pauly to me: three of us, one small town, the same stubborn discipline passed hand to hand.

The image came from Japan.

After Loras I spent five years there, teaching in the Osaka area. I learned to paint └ not in Kyoto, where foreigners go looking for Japan, but in working Osaka, under a priest named Father Inoue, who taught me bokashi: the art of shading a color from full to pale so cleanly that no edge shows. Haiga turned out to be the one form that needed exactly the two things I went so far to learn — the word and the image — and I have spent much of my life carrying them toward each other. I make the images now with MidJourney, and have worked with it since it first opened to the public in 2022.