Richard R. Powell

David McFadden introduced me to the Japanese poetic tradition in my first creative writing course in 1983. Basho, Issa, and other itinerant poets footing it across a rugged landscape appealed to my youthful imagination. The wandering mendicants reminded me of my own rambles down Kootenay back roads visiting with rural artists and potters. I belonged to those mountain towns, pastoral valleys, and overgrown orchards, and I exposed rolls of film to capture the qualities I loved there. Years later a description of wabi sabi in the book Washi: World of Japanese Paper by Sukey Hughes finally provided words for those qualities. When I wrote Wabi Sabi Simple the only dedicated book on the market at the time was Leonard Koren's Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers which is still a standard on the subject today. My research continued for my second book, Wabi Sabi for Writers, which is a deeper exploration of the relationship between wabi sabi, poetry, and a quality of writing that Basho arrived at late in his life. Karumi, as he called it, is the result of following "the way of elegance," a literary path towards lightness, acceptance, and beauty. I'm following the "way of elegance" now as I continue to write from my home on Vancouver Island. I hope you will visit stillinthestream.com for more information and updates on my latest projects.