Theme:

In honour of the panel I’m on at the Emerging Writers’ Festival this Saturday (The Revolution Will be Downloaded – 3pm, Melbourne Town Hall), the theme of this month’s haiku competition will be the richness of the internet. From literature to lolcats, Google maps, epic fails, confessionalisms, copyrighted material, Facebook statuses, online libraries, strange followers, first encounters, distance romances, YouTube nights, eBay finds… you get the picture. Now squish that richness into haiku.

The rules:

1. Write a haiku (the wiki entry explains the form quite well if you’re stumped) which has something vaguely to do with the theme. Make it fun, light, poignant, sexy, whatever – be creative and have fun.

2. Either tweet your creation on Twitter, tagging it @LiteraryMinded and/or #LMhaikucomp (I’ll check both for entries); or post it as a comment on this blog post (if you’re not signed up, just a name and email is required). Do this by midnight next Saturday the 6 of June (AEST) – I know I’m a little late with this one. I will announce the winner on Sunday the 7 June. You can enter as many times as you like. International entries welcome. Get some inspiration from Cordite’s Haikunaut Renga 1 and Haiku for People.

The prizes:

This month is going to be a choose-your-own reading adventure prize. When the winner is announced, I’ll email them a large list of books, and they’ll pick a couple. The runner-up will get one too. There are fresh crime novels (incl. GJ Moffat and Gillian Flynn); YA novels (incl. Kate Welshman, Kate Forsyth); and literary fiction (incl. Deborah Forster, Virginia Duigan and Jonathan Littell).

See last month’s winners.