New to Haiku: Discover the Joys of Collaboration with kjmunro

Today, New to Haiku is pleased to invite back kjmunro, Managing Editor of THF’s Haiku Dialogue here at The Haiku Foundation. This is a condensed version of a presentation she gave at Haiku North America 2025 in San Francisco, California, on September 26, 2025.

My name is Katherine Munro, & I publish under the name kjmunro. I live in northern Canada in the Yukon Territory, on the traditional territories of the Kwanlin Dün First Nation & the Ta’an Kwäch’än Council. I tell people I was lonely, with no haiku poets that I knew of in my region, so I founded (& continue to facilitate) ‘solstice haiku’, a monthly haiku discussion group in Whitehorse, & it has changed my life!

In this brief article, I hope to inspire you poets to pay attention to opportunities for collaboration in your own community, much the same way that you pay attention to your environment for inspiration to write haiku.

• Look for sources of information. I am fortunate that in my area there is an email list for arts organizations which has been a wealth of information & opportunities.

• Join (or form!) a local writing group. This can be as basic as inviting a writer friend to a local coffee shop once a week to write. The connection & accountability can lead to other things, like becoming beta readers for each other, or organizing a reading (at the coffee shop!).

• Collaborate in a writing project. Invite a poet you know to explore a new form (septenga!). This can be in person or via email or snail mail.

• Join an organization & offer to co-edit a members’ anthology. It is less pressure & more fun to do something like this with someone you already know, maybe someone who has some experience editing if you haven’t done this before.

• Check out your local community radio station. They are often looking for content––you could organize a reading/interview or create an on-going radio show featuring haiku.

• Apply for local residencies & projects––even if they aren’t really looking for poets. I have had some success with this, creating photo haiga at an En Plein Air festival (which was really aimed at visual artists), & offering haiku workshops at the Fireweed Market, a riverside summer farmers’ market here in Whitehorse, among others. [You can see kjmunro’s work at the En Plein Air festival beginning at timestamp 1:05 here.]
• Volunteer. It can be a lot of time & work, but I recommend organizing a haiku conference for your local haiku community, or offer to help out an existing organization, such as Haiku Canada, The Haiku Society of America, Haiku North America, or The Haiku Foundation.

Here are three examples of my own successful collaborations, large and small:

1. During COVID, our local community garden invited artists to come to the garden––I think they anticipated musicians practising musical instruments or visual artists sketching & painting. Of course, this sounded like a perfect outing for the solstice haiku discussion group––a ginko! We met there several times over that summer, & following summers, & the result was a plethora of garden-inspired haiku that we were invited to share at the annual harvest potluck at the garden, & that we self-published in a beautiful little anthology called Chasing Sunlight, which we “sold” by donation, raising $200 for the garden.
2. With the support of Jazz Yukon, & many individuals, the solstice haiku discussion group embarked on an ambitious project––a performance of haiku read to the improvised jazz accompaniment of two musicians, Marie Gallagher on flute & Lonnie Powell on percussion. Our first performance was at the Globe Theatre in Atlin, BC in the summer of 2024. We were all so thrilled with the result, that we managed to restage it at an Arts in the Park event in Whitehorse in June 2025. With the assistance of Express Micro-Grant, Department of Tourism & Culture, Government of Yukon, funding was procured to hire four camera operators, & we are now in the film editing stage. We expect to launch our amazing collaboration publicly in 2027––watch for it!
3. From 2018-2019, Alaskan writer Corinna Cook lived & worked in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, on a Fulbright fellowship. She enthusiastically took an interest in the local writing community & was soon a regular member of the solstice haiku discussion group (although she maintained that she had no prior experience with the genre). One of our group events was a Zoom presentation with Canadian haiku masters Philomene Kocher & Marco Fraticelli celebrating the publication of Changing Demographics, their collection of septenga––a collaborative sequence of seven linked stanzas. I decided I would like to try writing one, & invited Corinna to join me. She had moved back to Alaska, so we corresponded via email. Because of other obligations on both our parts, it took two years to complete, & we were often writing from different locations, so ‘in motion’ was tagged onto the title. We were both very happy when Editor Mike Montreuil agreed to publish it in Haiku Canada Review Vol. 18 No. 2, October 2024.

this cold – a septenga in motion

by kjmunro & Corinna Cook

 

ice cream &
a park bench
in Central Park

two modern dancers
making glacier shapes

autumn ginko
another pen won’t write
in this cold

lopsided crimson
one frost-nipped ear

large mosquitoes
our glasses sweat
on the patio table

peeling back whale blubber
juices congeal on sea ice

frigid relationship –
hardening the resolve
to meet

Whether you start big or start small, wishing you good luck in all your collaborative endeavours, from the snowy Yukon!

Originally from Vancouver, Canada, kjmunro moved to the Yukon Territory in 1991 & now lives on the traditional territories of the Kwanlin Dün First Nation & the Ta’an Kwäch’än Council. She served for 10 years as Membership Secretary for Haiku Canada, & is also a member of The League of Canadian Poets, The Federation of BC Writers, & The Haiku Society of America. In 2014, she founded ‘solstice haiku’, a monthly haiku discussion group in Whitehorse that she continues to facilitate. Since 2018, she has curated a weekly blog feature for The Haiku Foundation, Haiku Dialogue, now managed with guest editors. She is the recipient of the 2023 Borealis Prize – The Commissioner of Yukon Award for Literary Contribution, her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, & her debut poetry collection is contractions (Red Moon Press, 2019). kjmunro1560.wordpress.com

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