Margaret Chula

Former President

2141 NW Walmer Drive

Portland, OR 97229 USA

Margaret (Maggie) Chula has been writing and teaching haiku, tanka, and haibun for thirty-five years. Her books include: Grinding My Ink (Haiku Society of America Merit Book Award winner); Shadow Lines (linked haibun with Rich Youmans); Always Filling, Always Full; This Moment; The Smell of Rust; and What Remains: Japanese Americans in Internment Camps (with quilt artist Cathy Erickson). In 2013, Mountains and Rivers Press published her tanka collection, Just This. Composer James Falzone selected eight tanka from Just This for his piece “How Can Barren Be So Beautiful.” Commissioned and performed by the choral group Tapestry, it premiered at Cornell College in Iowa on January 28, 2013. Maggie is also a performance artist, promoting tanka through her one-woman show “Three Women Who Loved Love.” In this bilingual presentation, she reenacts the lives of poets Izumi Shikibu, Akiko Yosano, and Masajo Suzuki through music, dialog, and period costumes. “Three Women” premiered in Krakow in 2003 and toured to New York, Boston, Portland, Ottawa, and Ogaki, Japan. After living and teaching in Kyoto for twelve years, she now makes her home in Portland, Oregon, where she hikes, gardens, swims, and creates flower arrangements for every room of the house. Visit her website.

thirty years later

I find them

pressed in my journal

what was that flower and

who was that man

Fire Pearls: Short Masterpieces of the Human Heart, 2007

father-in-law

who taught me how to sail

now asks me the word

for the place

where horses sleep

Ash Moon Press Anthology, 2008

yesterday’s desires

what were they?

a vase

without flowers

holds only itself

First Prize, Sixth International Tanka Contest, Tokyo, 2009