Seabeck Haiku Getaway 2025

Getting to Seabeck

Click to read extensive advice on how to get to Seabeck from SeaTac Airport, from Victoria or Vancouver in British Columbia, or from Portland, Oregon by various ferry and road options. For those who are new to the Pacific Northwest, our ferries can be confusing or intimidating. Explore the preceding link to learn about your many options, depending on where you're traveling from. And do take a ferry if you can—the trip can be wonderfully scenic! You can also read more about Seabeck at the Visit Kitsap Peninsula website.

Conference Center Location

The Seabeck Conference Center is a warm and rustic getaway retreat center located at 13395 Seabeck Highway NW, in Seabeck, Washington (see the Bing map, Google map, or MapQuest map). The wooded conference grounds, next to a lagoon and a marina on Hood Canal, feature lovely views across the tidal water of the Olympic Mountains. Many of the facility’s accommodations are historic or relocated heritage buildings. Traveling from Seattle to Seabeck takes about 75 minutes (about 70 miles) via Tacoma (no toll northbound; toll to cross the bridge southbound only), nearly two hours if you take the Seattle-to-Bremerton ferry (about 45 driving miles), or 90 minutes if you take the Seattle-to-Bainbridge ferry (about 50 driving miles). For our haiku retreat, we’ll be meeting in the new Pines building (which can hold 100+ people). For more information about the conference center, visit www.seabeck.org. Also, get an overview of the conference center by viewing the Seabeck campus map. If it’s necessary for you to contact the conference center, their phone number is 360-830-5010, but please note that the conference center does not handle our retreat reservations.

Shuttle or Bus

If you need transportation from the Seattle airport to the conference center, please let us know. Or contact www.kitsapairporter.com for shuttle details (phone 360-876-1737 or 800-562-7948). Contact Kitsap Airporter for prices. If you can get a ferry as a walk-on passenger from Seattle to Bainbridge Island, Kitsap Transit offers bus service from Bainbridge to Silverdale (near Seabeck), and we could most likely arrange to have someone pick you up in Silverdale (depending on timing), or you could use Uber of Lyft services. Renting a car might be right for you, but you probably won’t use the car at all for three days at the retreat (if you stay the entire time).

Accommodations

For 2025, we’ll be staying in Pines (a new building) and in Spruce. Rooms are limited but all have private bathrooms, except for a limited number of semi-private rooms in Pines where two bedrooms share a bathroom. We encourage you to double up if possible (we will pair you with a roommate unless you have your own roommate preference or request a private room). Read more about our accommodations, including photos and layout maps. Pines is also our meeting facility, and Spruce is nearby, and both are a short walk from our dining hall. See Seabeck campus photos. If necessary for additional overflow, we may be able to arrange other housing facilities on the conference grounds with more beds. Click to see a Seabeck photo gallery and the Seabeck campus map. For alternate accommodations, consider Eaglewood at Seabeck, an Airbnb. Additional hotels and motels are available in nearby Silverdale (about seven miles away). However, we eagerly encourage you to stay at our Seabeck accommodations.

What to Bring

All bed linens and towels are provided (supplied once for the whole weekend). Please bring clothes for both warm and rainy weather. We’ve planned to have perfectly sunny skies, but you never know if you might need an umbrella and a rain jacket for one of our haiku walks. Make sure to bring a flashlight and perhaps a bathrobe (although all rooms have private bathrooms), and perhaps earplugs (if your roommate snores). Please bring haiku for round-robin readings, haiku sheets (see below) or other handouts to share, and items for the silent auction (see below). Please also bring your haiku notebook and lots of creativity and enthusiasm. And while you’re at it, bring some poet friends, too!

Wi-fi

Free wi-fi service is available all over Seabeck Conference Center facilities, with strongest connections in all the meeting rooms and accommodations.

Meals

All meals are served buffet-style at the Seabeck Conference Center dining hall. Vegetarian and nonvegetarian options (including vegan) are available at every meal, if arranged beforehand, and they have a superb salad bar. Soy-free meals are no longer being offered. If you have additional dietary or allergy concerns, please let us know when you register.

Name Tags

Be creative in making your own name tag. There’s no vote or prize for the best ones, but please do make your own name tag in a creative way. Click to see the first of many photos showing our 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013 retreat name tags. Top these!

Silent Auction

If you’re willing to donate items for our silent auction, you’ll help us raise money to offset expenses. Books are welcome, but you don’t need to limit yourself to books (items don’t have to be haiku-related, either, but do make them of interest to fellow haiku poets). As a courtesy, please refrain from donating books by poets who are likely to be present and might be selling those books themselves.

Book Fair

Have haiku books for sale or trade? If so, please bring them to display on our book table. Please price your books and indicate who should be paid for purchases.

Haiku Sheets

As a special way to commemorate the weekend, we invite you to create a keepsake trifold haiku sheet (or something similar) with a selection of your haiku or senryu, whether recent poems or best-of selections. Please make at least 60 copies (ask us if you want to know a more specific number, based on registrations) to share with everyone present (attendance usually exceeds 50, which has happened from 2012 onwards, and we had a record number of 83 in 2018). At most retreats we have a special reading of poems from these sheets.

Kukai

A tradition we’ve had at Seabeck since our retreat began is to have an annual kukai, or haiku contest. Participants offer two anonymous haiku on index cards (provided) for a voting process by attendees, often with prizes given to the top poems. Participation is optional. We continue this tradition to recognize the way Japanese haiku group meetings are usually conducted, and to heighten our attention to the selection and consideration of poems. The process encourages the writing of new work, the mindful selection of poems to enter, and the careful consideration of everyone's poems for the purpose of voting. When anyone selects your poem, at that moment the poem is said to be “born.” Winning poems are automatically included in the annual Seabeck conference anthology.

Retreat Anthology

A big hit at our previous retreats has been the publication of haiku collections to commemorate the weekend, including hand-sewn chapbooks. Our 2009 anthology, Seeing Stars, even won the "Best Anthology" award in 2010 in the Haiku Society of America’s Kanterman Book Awards (for books published in 2009). Our 2022 handmade anthology, Deepening Leaves, won a special commendation for book design and aesthetics. We’ll do another new anthology for our next retreat, collecting poems written or shared at the retreat, plus the winners from our annual kukai (haiku contest). One copy is free to each attendee, and is mailed out after the retreat. Click here for a description of our 2009 retreat publications (shown here). To see selected past anthologies, visit Amazon (most of our past anthologies are not listed here, however, because they were limited-edition handmade publications).

Haiga Exhibit

Please bring copies of any haiga or photo-haiga (framed or unframed) that you’d like to display. Please note that you cannot hang them on the walls, but can place them flat on tables or on table/floor easels. For many years, the Haiga Adventure Study Group of Puget Sound Sumi Artists has staged a haiga exhibit in the dining hall and parts of our meeting space, and more recently just in our meeting space. This has been a wonderful way to show haiku and haiga to everyone present at Seabeck during our weekend retreat.

We sometimes also do a slide show of haiga using a digital projector, so please bring some of your haiga in electronic form on a USB flash drive, CD, or in another format (check our schedule to see if that will happen this year). For more information about haiga, click here.

Arrival

Upon your arrival on Thursday, please check in with our registrar in the lobby of the Historic Inn or in Pines (see campus map). On Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, please register at the Pines meeting room. Please arrive by the following times, depending on the day:

• Thursday: Please arrive and check in at the Historic Inn between 4:00 and 6:00 pm. If you come earlier in the afternoon, you can explore the waterfront or other parts of Seabeck, but the conference center has asked us not to explore their grounds until after 4:00 p.m.. Dinner starts at 6:00 p.m. If you arrive at 7:00 p.m. or later, please join us in the Pines building.

• Friday: Please arrive and check in before dinner, which usually starts at 6:00, sometimes at 6:30 p.m. (sometimes half an hour later than usual on Friday only, but confirm on the schedule page). Check in with us at Pines if you arrive before dinner, or at dinner time come to the Historic Inn, where we'll be eating at the dining hall.

• Saturday: For day visitors, please arrive and check in at 9:00 a.m. (Pines). If you can't arrive by 9:00 a.m., please join us when you can.

• Sunday: For day visitors, please arrive and check in at 9:00 a.m. (Pines).

Questions

If you have questions, please contact the conference organizers or visit the following websites:

• Michael Dylan Welch: welchm@aol.com / 206-240-0871 cell

• John S Green: jsgreenmachine@yahoo.com / 612-991-3330 cell

• Seabeck Conference Center: www.seabeck.org

• Seabeck Conference Center map: https://www.seabeck.org/campus-map

• Accommodation photos and layout maps: https://www.seabeck.org/housing

• Seabeck Weather Report: https://weather.com/weather/today/l/98380:4:US

• Seabeck 10-Day Weather Forecast: https://weather.com/weather/tenday/l/Seabeck+WA+98380:4:US#/!

Seabeck Haiku Retreat Registration Page

Click here for the 2025 registration page.

See you at Seabeck!