Teaching the Haiku Memoir

More adventures in making comics with strangers

I was back at the University of Fribourg again recently to lead our now-traditional “Picture Yourself” memoir minicomic workshop. I look forward to this event every year and this year was no exception: incredible cookies, fantastic chats and enthusiastic participation and I got to head home with the sweetest ever “dissertating care-package” from the event organizers!

This year’s exercise was a “haiku minimemoir” foldie comic inspired in part by a really enjoyable and thought-provoking haiku comics workshop for the SAW Friday Night Comics weekly online event taught by cartoonist David Lasky. (I really love this series and highly recommend them if you are ever in the mood to draw but don’t know where to start!)

As in previous years, I wanted to make one-page foldie comics so that everyone could leave with a completed “book” at the end of the evening. Our session closed with everyone wandering around and reading each others’ comics and I found it so touching to see the excitement this sharing generated. Each little book turned out beautifully: some funny, some serious or sad, and pretty much every single one featuring the gorgeous springtime sun that had burst through our clouds earlier that day.

Interested in making a haiku minimemoir of your own? It takes a little under an hour and you’ll have your own little easily-reproducible book at the end. Here’s how:

First we write…

We started our exercise by completing a review frame as designed by cartoonist and educator Lynda Barry. This format allows you to take seven minutes to create a fairly complete picture of the occurrences of your day. It’s a helpful starting point for a number of different exercises and I return to it frequently. Short version: three minutes to list 7-8 things that happened to you during the day; three minutes to list 7-8 things you saw during the day; 30 second to write one question you have and another 30 seconds to write one quote or overheard phrase and that’s it! The only thing I changed was replacing the “question” block with “something undone” for our haiku exercise.

With our review frame serving as a reference for our day, we then we took 3-5 minutes to write our haikus. Our haikus were the most simplified version of the form where we focused on a three-line poem of seventeen total syllables where the first line contained five syllables, the second line contained seven, and the final line contained five again. I recommend writing two to three and then choosing your favorite.

To write them, I offered two options:

• Option one: choose two to three things from your review frame and use them as the basis for your haiku

• Option two: if you’re feeling blocked, I have a skeleton-structure you can adapt:

  • Spread 1: a nice moment

    Spread 2: something neglected, forgotten or abandoned

    Spread 3: something from nature.

To keep things interesting, I tend to advise you to stay out of the “middle” - focus on extremes and contrast for added interest. In adaptation or retelling, I want to read something that reinterprets a story through the lens of something super macro or super micro. In autobio, I want to hear about either your MOST TYPICAL day or the day that went completely off the rails… both of them tell me something about you as a person and both leave me wanting to know more: both prompt further questions. 

Now, with our writing done, it’s time to draw!

In our workshops, I fold the minibooks in advance and limit students to ink drawing: we don’t do a pencil step and we don’t add color. As you’re working through this on your own, you can choose whether you pencil first or if you add color at the end, but I encourage you try the ink-only version at least once as an experiment: what changes in your drawing? Does anything change in your thinking? Was it freeing or terrifying (or both)?

We will be drawing our zines as three two-page spreads as well as a cover and a back cover: this is one of the formats that a one-page foldie fits most naturally and it is particularly well-suited to a haiku text. We will be drawing the three spreads first (draw your full body in at least one spread: way more dynamic than just drawing your head) and we will draw the cover and back cover LAST. When it’s time to draw, I recommend running a timer to keep yourself from getting too precious with your pages but that’s up to you here. I think it’s better to complete the whole thing and go back and add things or touch them up than to risk getting hung up and not finishing the process!

• First, add the text of your haiku to your book: I recommend one line per page 

• Time to draw: spend around 5 minutes drawing spread one. Add an image to suit your haiku text: it does not have to be an exact illustration. You can focus on a single detail or a related item, on yourself responding, anything! If you’re unsure of what you can draw, take a look back at your “saw” list on your review frame. Our brains like to draw connections between unrelated things and you can really play with that when making comics. 

• Take another 5 minutes to draw spread two: add an image to suit your haiku text. Again, you can illustrate the line you wrote, draw a related item, react or respond to it, or even redraw your previous page with subtle changes.

• Spend another 5 minutes drawing spread three: same thing! If you have not added a full-body self to a page, I recommend doing that now. 

• Cover: first, give your comic a title. Perhaps a keyword or phrase from your haiku or maybe just the date or time of the occurrences you wrote about. You can also revisit your review frame for a key phrase or pithy quote you still want to use. 

  • Give yourself 4-5 minutes to draw your the cover image: choose a single detail from inside your book and reproduce it: could be one item or a setting or a single face (maybe even in silhouette?!) something that hints at your comic’s contents but doesn’t give anything away. Be mysteeeeerious. At the bottom, add “by:” and your name - NOT TOO CLOSE TO THE BOTTOM OR THE COPIER WILL CUT IT OFF!

• Take another 4-5 minutes to draw your back cover. All my minimemoir comics share a similar back cover design:

To draw a similar back cover, on the top half of the page draw yourself in a fancy frame: this is your author photo. Underneath, you can add any text you want: today’s date or your contact information or a single line from your haiku or ask a loved one (or your nemesis) to write a “blurb” about your text: good choices include “stunning” “masterpiece” and “voice of a generation.” And with that, we’re done! (You can feel free to add color later if you would like.) 

You have a couple options now (or once your book is finished). You can hide it away and keep it for yourself. You can find a copy machine and, for just a few cents on the copy, you can publish your book for distribution. You can also just let this be it for your book and that’s fine.

Be warned though: sometimes minicomics are not content to be what they are and they want to be something more. You may find that this little minimemoir ends up being the jumping-off point for a larger book or story or project.  

Through the freewriting and experimentation we’ve done in order to make this minimemoir, you have also collected material to potentially return to in a future, longer autobiographical work. Not bad for around an hour of your time!

If you make a comic, I would love to see it!