Francine Porad: Living Through the Storm

     by Connie Hutchison

Haiku Northwest celebrated its 35th anniversary in 2023. The organization grew out of the leadership and vision of my friend and colleague, Francine Porad. She not only founded Haiku Northwest but was a visual artist, haiku writer, and editor of Brussels Sprout, a haiku and art journal. The following personal reflections serve to help others know her better and appreciate her legacy.

Francine’s “Letter from the Editor” messages in issues of Brussels Sprout contain reports and announcements of the first Haiku Northwest meetings and are the only written records of our early activities. Scans of Brussels Sprout issues published from 1988 to 1995 are available on the Haiku Northwest website. Physical issues and other materials are archived at the University of Washington.

In the early 1980s, I met Francine through a mutual friend, Nixeon Civille Handy. Nixeon and Francine were members of the Seattle Branch of the National League of American Pen Women—Pen Women for short. Nixeon was a letters member and my poetry mentor, and I attended a monthly poetry workshop that she hosted in her home. Francine was an established painter and arts member. She was a guest at one workshop after she had been inspired to write for a Seattle Branch program called “Marriage of the Arts.” The artist members were asked to write a poem, and the poets were asked to create a painting, on the premise that artistic disciplines are interrelated and cross-referencing. Francine brought short poems to the workshop at Nixeon’s; these were based on the colors of the visible spectrum. Each poem included the wavelength of the color in millimicrons. Over the next few years, we became friends.

As Francine pursued writing, she discovered the genre of haiku. She investigated the form, joined the Haiku Society of America, and subscribed to a few haiku publications. Positive receptions to her writing energized her to continue. She was thrilled to find that haiku editors, unlike editors of longer poems, responded quickly, sometimes within a week. The reliance on acute observation, the short form of haiku, and the quick response of editors were well suited to her personality and temperament. She was hooked! She especially admired the work of George Swede for his compassion, understanding, and humor about the human condition, and she aspired to accomplish that in her haiku.

Editor and Founder

By 1988 Francine had published haiku in many of the haiku publications of the day, had corresponded regularly with several editors—many of whom became friends—and written linked verse with many haiku writers active at that time. She became acquainted with Alexis Rotella, editor of Brussels Sprout. When Alexis considered discontinuing the journal because she had decided to pursue other projects, she agreed to transfer the editorship to Francine. The letter from Alexis endorsing this agreement appears in the first issue Francine edited (May 1988). To help assure a smooth transition, Francine engaged guest editors to select the poems for the first three issues: David LeCount (May 1988), George Swede (September 1988), and Ruth Yarrow (January 1989).

Being the social, gregarious person she was, Francine was eager to meet with other poets to share, discuss, and write haiku. She was determined to convene such a group. The announcement of the inaugural meeting of “Northwest Haiku” appears in the September 1988 issue of Brussels Sprout, and the report of the first meeting naming special guests from Canada appears in the January 1989 issue.

That first meeting on September 15, 1988 is described in our 25th anniversary anthology No Longer Strangers. Special guests included Beth Jankola, anne mckay, and Anna Vakar from British Columbia; editors George Klacsanzky (Haiku Zasshi Zō) and Michael Kettner (Catalyst); and local poets, well known for their traditional and free-verse poems: Nixeon Civille Handy, Sarah Singer, and Eve Triem. Most of the other writers comprising the approximately 30 attendees were not writing haiku. Jankola, mckay, and Vakar each read their work, followed by a discussion of haiku and its characteristics. Haiku publications on display attracted much attention and were the first that some of us had encountered.

A core of aspiring haiku writers began meeting in January 1989 at the Bellevue Public Library. Eventually, we met every other month in Francine’s home on Mercer Island. Editing the journal and organizing the haiku group began before the internet or cell phones. Our haiku meetings were publicized by word of mouth, sometimes printed flyers, telephone calls, and in the pages of Brussels Sprout. When Francine was elected president of the Haiku Society of America in 1993, the society created the Northwest Region, consisting of members in Washington and Oregon, and we also reported our activities in HSA newsletters. Our group was referred to as “Haiku Northwest” in the January 1993 issue and this name was repeated in the last issue of Brussels Sprout (September 1995).

When Francine decided to edit Brussels Sprout, she asked me to be associate editor. She and I worked together in her home for eight years, generally once a week. At her dining room table, we read the submissions and made our choices until we had accepted about 100 poems. We actively sought haiku and senryu and published them without segregating them in separate sections. Each issue was paginated and contained an index of authors, book reviews and books received, haiku, senryu, haiku sequences, and essays. We included haibun and linked verse beginning in the January 1991 issue, and tanka in May of that year.

We never published a poem that we didn’t both agree on. When we didn’t agree, we would each state our point of view, discuss, and then decide again. If we still didn’t agree, then we didn’t accept the poem. Often, one of us would change our mind. Francine would write an acceptance or rejection note to the author immediately after we made our choices. I was always amazed at her facility in accomplishing this, and was grateful it wasn’t my task. Her suggestions to an author were always cordial and supportive, as John Stevenson and William Scott Galasso will attest. She signed her notes “Warmest regards, Francine Porad.” Sometimes the notes would be sealed and stamped, and I would post them at the Mercer Island post office on my way home, an example of her energy and focus.

Francine would use her Mac computer to print all the poems we had selected and give me a copy. We would agree on the opening and ending haiku. Sequencing the issue was my domain; finding the link and shift of the remaining poems was always a wonderful challenge I looked forward to. I would cut the poems with author names into small rectangles and arrange these on my dining room table, where I would move them around. Some poems seemed naturally to match well and would remain together even after several shiftings. Sometimes a poem was so strong or unique that any poem following it would be overshadowed—or “killed,” a concept I learned from Nixeon. As editors, we wanted to present each poem in its best context. The ideal solution was to juxtapose equally strong poems, but when that wasn’t possible, we could place an image of the featured artist near it. We could also place it before a page turn to use time as a palate cleanser for the reader.

I would tape the poems in sequence and then we would create the pages and position the art. With her juried memberships in Women Painters of Washington, American Watercolor Society, and National League of American Pen Women, Francine had many friends in the arts, which enabled her to create a journal of haiku that featured a different artist in each issue, often with up to ten images. The featured artists hailed from the United States, Canada, Japan, and Norway, with images in diverse media including linoleum cut, silkscreen, woodblock print, sumi, watercolor, pen and ink, and mixed media. The crisp, black images on dove-grey paper contributed to the uniqueness of the journal.

Using Aldus PageMaker layout software, Francine would make a physical mockup of each page in its 5.5 x 8.5–inch format, placing the two half-pages side by side in reading order. Printing at Kinko’s on 8.5 x 11–inch sheets required that the half pages be reordered and affixed with glue stick: the front cover and back cover would be on the same sheet, the center pages would be sequential, and the numbers of remaining pages were placed to achieve the correct reading order when it was printed. For example, the cover image would be on the right (recto) side and the back cover on the left (verso), so when it was folded and stapled, the cover image would be on top. If the middle pages were 24 and 25, then the next full sheet would be pages 23 and 26, 22 and 27, and so on. We also had to account for printing on both sides of each full sheet when creating the order for printing. Issues were printed, folded, and stapled at Kinko’s.

Visual Artist

Francine wore many hats: wife to Bernard, mother of six children, tax preparer for H&R Block, and member and officer of several arts organizations, to name a few. She didn’t begin to paint until she was 40 years old. Her recently widowed father-in-law said he’d like to take an art class, but he didn’t want to go alone. She said, “I’ll go with you, Dad.” She thought she would like to be able to draw her children. She sold her first work after only three months of classes. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from the University of Washington in 1976 and graduated in the same ceremony as one of her sons.

She was best known at that time as a portrait artist, teaching and advertising for portraiture. She explored realistic landscapes and florals, then geometric patterns of homes on hillsides. A sampling of her watercolor florals was featured in the May 1994 issue of Brussels Sprout.

Her style evolved from representational pieces to abstract work over several years with an emphasis on color, light, and form. Once, when we took a break from reading submissions, she took me downstairs to her studio. She explained how she painted in series, preparing several sheets of Arches watercolor paper, laying them on the floor. She would dissolve the desired pigment in a container of water, then throw it across the papers. I imagined this as a slow, underhand style like pitching a ball. When the first layer was dry, she would repeat with a different concentration, usually in the same color family, throwing from a different direction. This created overlapping, stream-like washes and interconnecting runnels. Eventually she would use up to six or seven layers of paint until it became very web-like. She would augment areas that she thought were interesting by adding brush work with contrasting colors or saturated tones, often emphasizing negative space. An example of her web-like style is the “Cross-Fade” series seen in Stepping Out Magazine #25, circa 1989.

She also demonstrated how she determined which part of the paper was the finished painting. Taking two L-shaped two-inch mats, one in each hand, she moved the mats to highlight different areas, finding which parts of a composition were most pleasing and ready to frame. She used mainly metallic frames from Daniel Smith. An image might be 12 x 18 inches, framed as 18 x 24 inches with a three-inch mat.

She continued to explore abstraction, taking a monotype printing class in Port Townsend, Washington in 1987, sometimes sleeping overnight on the studio floor. As with aqua media, she typically worked in series and used the whole palette. She created many monoprints, which are paintings printed on paper. Paint or printing ink is applied to a surface such as glass or hard plastic. Items are laid into the paint to create visual and actual texture, such as bubble wrap, lace, or fuzzy yarn. Then the paper is laid on the wet surface and pressure is applied. This transfers the paint and textures to the paper. It’s possible to make several prints from one inking. For example, she would lay something down, mask out an area, and print it. The next printing would have the same composition with variations such as lines made with hairy yarn. The little groove from the yarn can become a receptacle for watercolor. Each individual work was primarily blue, yellow, or green, but a series showed variations on a theme and displayed the whole spectrum. When an image had dried, Francine often collaged additional pieces onto the monoprint and highlighted areas with brush work.

Color reproductions of selected monoprints appeared in Stepping Out Magazine #25 and in an anthology produced by Kathleen P. Decker in 2001, On Crimson Wings: Centennial Anthology of the Japanese Consulate in Seattle (Laughing CyPress). Some monotypes and some web-like paintings appeared in the May 1989 issue of Brussels Sprout. Three of Francine’s chapbooks incorporate color reproductions of her paintings: the collage “Without End” appears on the cover of All The Games (1987), and “Undertow” (1988) and “Beachfront Wave” (1989) appear on the cover and near the back cover of cur*rent (1989). These were color reproductions on glossy or semi-glossy paper that were then affixed to each printed volume. In Sunlight Comes and Goes (2004), the color images were printed directly on the glossy cover and on the interior pages.

She said of her work, “I’m looking for something with a solid structure, but with a random quality. . . . I’m seeking an uncontrived look: random yet purposeful, exciting yet peaceful—a seeming contradiction.”

All her paintings were well documented; Bernard would photograph each painting, creating a color slide that would be protected in a sleeve. Many sleeves, each holding a dozen or more slides, were collected in a large three-ring binder. Francine’s slide collections are archived in the Women Painters of Washington archive at the University of Washington. A search for “Francine Porad” in the archives will bring up the other organizations she was a member of: Haiku Northwest, the National League of American Pen Women, and the Northwest Watercolor Society. Likewise, a search for “haiku” will return results for Haiku Northwest, the Vashon Island haiku group, and other collections with a haiku connection.

Haiku Poet

When Francine had success publishing her early haiku, she decided to put together a small chapbook for two reasons: to have a record of poems that had been published in the past year to share with her family, and to meet the challenge of creating a pleasing and artistically arranged volume. Her first chapbook was Connections: Haiku, Senryu, and Sketches (1986). Publication acknowledgments included Alchemist, Brussels Sprout, Cicada, Dragonfly, Frogpond, Haiku Zasshi Zō, Modern Haiku, New Cicada, Red Pagoda, and Windchimes—journals familiar to many haiku poets—attesting to her creative output and her marketing. Brussels Sprout in this list refers to the period while it was edited by Alexis Rotella. As with several succeeding volumes, Connections was illustrated with very energetic markings made with a Flair pen. Her chapbooks became an annual tradition often coinciding with the holiday season.

She began using the imprint Vandina Press, which she coined by combining the names of two of her granddaughters, Vanessa and Adina. We see this in the second chapbook, Pen and Inklings: Haiku, Senryu, and Sketches Volume 2. Vandina Press ISBNs were assigned in all subsequent volumes, beginning with her third chapbook, After Autumn Rain (1987). Thanks to the generosity of the Porad family, Haiku Northwest later used the Vandina Press imprint and ISBNs when printing its 25th anniversary anthology and the earliest Seabeck Haiku Getaway anthologies.

Francine’s collections, collaborations, trifolds, and haiku sheets published from 1986 to 2005 number about thirty. Her haiku are often autobiographical. Each haiku, senryu, or tanka contained a memory she wished to hold. Accolades and distinctions for her writing included the Cicada Chapbook Award in the fall of 1989 for Without Haste; first prize in the Poetry Society of Japan International Tanka Competition, 1993; and the Ito En Tea International Haiku Contest, 1996 and 1998. Here’s her 1996 winner, the last line of which inspired the title of Haiku Northwest’s 25th anniversary anthology:

poolside, we chat

about reincarnation

no longer strangers

She also won the Heron’s Nest Award in April of 2003 for this poem:

bird feeder empty of seed

even the jays

look for Bernard

Francine’s collection The Patchwork Quilt won the 1994 Haiku Society of America Merit Book Award. The judges, George Knox and Robert Major, wrote “. . . true to the author’s work in general, a blending of pathos, humor, and wit. The book’s integrity is marked by a refreshing absence of pretentiousness, a tenderness without sentimentality. Also included are her monoprints. Porad is an excitingly versatile writer and painter.”

The city of Ōgaki, Japan, was the final destination of Matsuo Bashō on one of his long journeys, as recounted in Oku no Hosomichi. Every November the city holds a Bashō festival. During the 1995–1996 school year, Renée Cohen, an English teacher in Ōgaki, published A Haiku Selection from the Writings of Francine Porad: An English–Japanese Translation Project by Second Year Students in the Department of International Studies at Ōgaki Women’s College. She chose her favorite poems from eleven of Francine’s publications and worked with each student to help them “value the effort required to bound two worlds, two languages, two cultures, two ways of thinking and doing to express the one same heart in every human.”

Ever the collaborator, Francine exchanged early linked verse using email as her way of sharing ideas and having a conversation when long-distance calls were expensive. With Marlene Mountain in Tennessee, she published cur*rent, a collection of linked haiku and art by both women.

Francine and Marlene wrote for several years with Kris Kondo in Japan, producing the following books: Other Rens, Other Rens Book 2 and Book 3, and Trio of Wrens. This trio also produced several unpublished manuscripts. The “Rens” are six lines long, the voices alternating one line each, with each woman contributing two lines total, their pattern derived from the rengay format devised by Garry Gay in 1992. The order in the following example from Other Rens (Vandina Press, 2000) is Marlene Mountain, Francine Porad, Kris Kondo (m f k m f k).

renred

m  f  k

box of 6 red yellow orange female green purple blue male

ripened tomatoes weighting down the trellis

in shiny shoes tapping down the sidewalk avoiding the cracks

‘cadmium red deep’ a hue i desperately long for

wow! cadmium crimson at Winsor-Newton’s sample table

wouldn’t be caught dead in what I adore on others

HSA newsletter editor Pamela Miller Ness attended a national HSA meeting in Redmond, Washington in December 2004 to award Francine the Haiku Society of America’s Sora Award. I chose some of my favorite poems Francine had written, and with Marilyn Sandall, Northwest regional coordinator, we read “A Portrait of Francine: In Her Own Words,” of which the following are selections.

I raise my head

from his chest, heartbeats

to crickets

occupational hazard:

paint on her nightgown

Michelangelo

tapped his Moses on the knee:

arise and walk!

I kiss the cherry-red mouth

on the canvas

warmed by the fire

       not wanting to be older

       or younger

first yoga session:

       rhythmic

       creaking

drawing a house

with a fenced-in yard

the deaf boy

Mother’s Day

gift-wrapped box of chocolates

one piece missing

watering the garden

Taylor waters Grandpa

                   twice

twilight deepens—

      the wordless things

      I know

hospital vigil

the imperceptible shift

of clouds

tied to the bush

hundreds of wishes

fluttering white

     Meiji Shrine, Tokyo

vacation’s end:

I learn by heart

the cloudless blue

Painter and Poet

In 1996 Francine wrote an essay titled “A Personal Journey to Haiku,” published in a 1997 Frogpond supplement and available on the Haiku Northwest website. In it she recalls saying once, “I was an artist before I became a poet.” Someone took offense at this statement, asking if she thought poets weren’t artists. She meant, of course, that she was a visual artist first. Such distinctions became a touchpoint of self-discovery and self-definition that were integral to her painting and writing for about ten years, from the mid-1980s to the 1990s. This was the same period in which she began to shift from realistic representation to abstraction in her art, while also developing her skill as a haiku writer. She credits a tanka, published in Poet’s Market, 1995, and a dream for an answer to her debate:

should I paint,

should I write—

in the dream

I stride a sunlit street

wearing one black shoe, one white

This tanka is a statement made at the culmination of ten years of debate and discovery, a declaration of the importance of both painting and writing in her creative life.

She sometimes used the same theme for both disciplines, consciously trying to explore an idea more fully. She adapts Bashō’s maxim “to know the pine, go to the pine” in this tanka, published in Windsong, 1995:

legend has it

a sorcerer stole

three days of sunshine;

I stumble through dark clouds

to know the storm

Her paraphrase was “to know the storm, one must live through it.” Her personal storm was a series of events—a hospital stay and lengthy recovery, the life-threatening illness of her sister, the death of her mother. She wrote a 20-verse tanka sequence about her mother’s final illness and death, and created a series of ten paintings titled “To Know the Storm.” Three of these paintings appear in her chapbook All the Games, 1997. She writes, “The first eight paintings are moody, often dark, but by the ninth and tenth, my palette had lightened. I can’t paint and remain unhappy.”

Her expressions in writing and painting were the means of working through grief. I think this is a beautiful example of how making art has the power to heal us. These expressions also demonstrate how well she integrated writing and painting in her artist journey.