Keeping My Spirits High This July

Almost a week into July already and I haven't yet shown you my calendar page for the month! Below is the July page of the haiku and photography calendar that I made for my family as Christmas presents. (If you search under "calendar" on my blog you will find the other months so far.) Click on the image to enlarge.

July 2012 - Kirsten's Calendar of Haiku & Photography 

The haiku received an Honorable Mention in the Haiku International Association Haiku Contest (Japan) 2009. And the photo was taken at Te Puke Cemetery in 2010 (I think! - have visited a lot of them over the past few years, all for the purposes of photography. I'm an angle hunter:).

I have a few haiku and tanka activities going on this month, all of which are helping keep my spirits up as I progress through my last two months of maintenance treatment for leukaemia.

The first is my tanka competition, The SILOH Tanka Contest, which I'm running to celebrate my birthday (July 31st). The theme is 'Winter Dream' and you'll find all the details for entering at the link above. You can also read and comment on the entries that have already come in here.

The prize, which I'm very excited to be give away, is Richard von Sturmer's unique and amazing DVD 26 Tanka Films. I look forward to awarding the winner with this excellent prize, and then hearing how much they enjoyed it! I have 18 entries already so it's going to be a hard one to judge. I might end up awarding a runner-up prize, of which I have just the thing, so watch this space :)

A few of my friends in the on-line haiku/tanka community are July babies as well so keep an eye out for other contests and giveaways about the blogs. Margaret Dornaus is inviting you to share one of your "moon" tanka on her blog here and she'll be giving away a copy of Makoto Ueda‘s Modern Japanese Tanka.

I'm also finding inspiration in collaboration this month. I'm part of two renku currently being written through cyber-space. The first is a junicho being lead by Sandra Simpson. We began this during the renku workshop at Haiku Festival Aotearoa and have continued on afterwards via the Issa's Snail site. You can pop in and see what we're up to here. I've also started a new rengay (or two, or three...) with Cara Holman, after a short break. If you search "rengay with Cara Holman" on my blog you will find a few that we've written. Enjoy!