Moving on with our series of honorable mentions in this year’s Kyoto Writing Competition, the judges were intrigued by Jeremiah Dutch’s piece, “Zen Failure in Kyoto” — excerpted and adapted from his novel-in-progress, Gaijin House. Jeremiah is a New England native raising two daughters with his wife in Yokohama. Having lived in Japan since 1998, he …Read More
Author: Karen Lee Tawarayama (Page 4 of 6)
by Karen Lee Tawarayama In September 1995, I traveled to India to commence my sophomore year in an alternative Quaker program with eight international centers and experiential learning at its core. After two months of Area Studies at our center in the southern technological hub of Bangalore*, I headed for Kathmandu to participate in a …Read More
Writers in Kyoto Member Stephen Benfey is a fiction writer, copywriter, and father. He lived in Kyoto during the 1970s, attending college, working for a Japanese gardener, producing videos, and listening to Osaka blues bands. There, he met his future wife and began writing. After raising children in Tokyo, the couple moved to a tiny …Read More
Over the coming weeks, submissions from the recent Writers in Kyoto Seventh Annual Writing Competition will be shared here on the website. We hope that our readers will also enjoy and be as moved by the content as the judges were in the very challenging process of selecting the winners. While there were a limited …Read More
Writers in Kyoto offer their heartfelt thanks to all who submitted their short shorts to the competition this year. Entries were received from a highly creative group comprised of twenty-five nationalities, based both in Japan and across the globe. A milestone has been reached with this year’s introduction of the Kyoto City Mayoral Prize (supported …Read More
Writers in Kyoto would like to extend heartfelt thanks to our friends at the Ireland Japan Association (IJS) for their assistance in promoting our fourth anthology, Structures of Kyoto, across the Emerald Isle. Structures of Kyoto is now housed in the library of the Visitors’ Centre at the Lafacadio Hearn Japanese Gardens in County Waterford. …Read More
While accessible in only a couple of hours, the wide metropolis of Tokyo sometimes feels a bit conceptually distant from quieter, more conservative Kyoto. Both cultural hubs of Japan, however, have vibrant literary communities which are of great benefit to each other by way of networking and knowledge sharing. Writers in Kyoto was delighted to …Read More
◆ THEME: Kyoto (English language submissions only)◆ DEADLINE: March 31st, 2022 (23:59 JST)◆ GENRE: Short Shorts (unpublished material only)◆ WORD LIMIT: 300 Words (to fit on a single page)◆ FORM: Short poems, character studies, essays, travel tips, whimsy, haiku sequence, haibun, wordplays, dialogue, experimental verse, etc. In short, anything that helps show the spirit of …Read More
Award-winning ecologist, writer, photographer, and Writers in Kyoto member Jann Williams was a contributor to Structures in Kyoto (WiK Anthology 4) but unable to attend our virtual book launch on August 22nd. Having missed that opportunity to introduce her essay “Beyond Zen – Kyoto’s Gorinto Connections” about the essence and evolution of the five-ring pagoda, …Read More
The judges of this year’s competition offer their heartfelt congratulations to Stephen Benfey for his masterful piece “Kyoto Time”, which is full of rich and dramatic imagery depicting an older and quieter Kyoto. The main character seems to embody this aspect of the city herself — multilayered and untouchable by the time that speeds by. …Read More
WiK Writing Competition
WiK Anthologies
The Nature of Kyoto (2023)
Eds. Lisa Twaronite Sone & Robert Weis
Foreword by Pico Iyer
Structures of Kyoto (2021)
Eds: Rebecca Otowa & Karen Lee Tawarayama
Foreword by Judith Clancy
Encounters with Kyoto (2019)
Eds: Jann Williams & Ian Josh Yates
Foreword by Juliet Winters Carpenter
Echoes (2017)
Eds: John Dougill, Amy Chavez, & Mark Richardson
Preface by Alex Kerr
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