October 18: An email dropped into my inbox overnight on Tuesday to say that I had won the Royal Canal Haiku Contest run by Haiku Ireland and celebrating the renovation of the Royal Canal in Dublin. Part of the prize is to have my haiku painted on a wall alongside the canal for Royal Canal Day on November 12! Read the three prizewinning poems here, but here’s mine anyway:
early nightfall –
the lock key warms up
in my fist
And the other part of the good news is that a wee project I’ve been working on quietly for the past few months has today got the green light – projecting haiku on to the inside of the Crystal Palace before shows during the Tauranga Arts Festival (October 26-November 3). This is the kind of public exposure haiku so rarely gets so I am very excited. The work being used in by poets who are more or less all members of the Fantail Haiku Group that is based in Tauranga-Western Bay of Plenty (the “or less” are generally family members or other close associates of members). The work has been selected on merit.
breath, a collection of haiku 
Great sounds good look forward to seeing it. Is the Fantail haiku group open to people from outside of Tauranga and the Western Bay of Plenty? if it was I would be interested in joining. Kind regards janet Janet Keen, Rotorua, New Zealand http://www.jkeen.net Blog: http://janetkeen.blogspot.com
Hi Janet,
The Fantail group was set up a year or so ago, by invitation only so we have kept a very low profile – and this year have hardly met at all! If anything changes I’ll let you know. Thanks for coming by.