The last of the funerals was a week ago but then, but then: The birth of a baby girl! I put in her cradle a precious possession, my old magic wand. It was gifted to me decades ago by the mother of the teenage boy whose self-death shattered us just a few days into the new year.

godmother 
the fairy tale 
starts with a scream 

My best friend will be guided to her death in a few weeks. Finally. Her suffering had become unbearable. Relief and sadness, sadness and relief.

There is no choice but to ride this rollercoaster.

wilted peonies 
bees buzz 
in the lavender  

Isabella Mori

(they/their) writes pretty much everything that’s not nailed down: fiction (a 15th-century monk whose best friend is a comfrey plant), nonfiction (“all the way from the eocene on Highway 400”), and poetry (with an emphasis on Japanese forms such as haiku and haibun). Their great love is hybrid work, as in their latest book, Believe Me: Stories about Mental Health & Addiction: Imagined, Lived, Analyzed (Three Ocean Press, 2025), which combines poetry, stories, interviews, and research.

Isabella is also the author of three books of and about poetry: Not So Pretty Haiku (Tigerpetal Press, 2022), A bagful of haiku: 87 imperfections (2017), and Isabella Mori’s tea-table book (poetry, 1980–2006). Their writing has appeared in numerous venues such as Drifting Sands Haibun, Frogpond Journal, Kingfisher Journal, Prune Juice, and Stone Circle Review; and has been anthologized in The Group of Seven Reimagined: Contemporary Stories Inspired by Historic Canadian Paintings (Heritage House, 2019), The Auroras & Blossoms Haiku Anthology (Vol. 1, July 2023), and Through The Portal: Tales from a Hopeful Dystopia (Exile Editions, 2024), among others.

Isabella lives on the ancestral, traditional and unceded lands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples, aka Vancouver, Canada. The author founded and runs Canada’s most unusual poetry prize, Muriel’s Journey, which celebrates loud, socially engaged poetry and is open only to poets who do volunteer work in their community.

Find Isabella Mori online at their HAIKUTHERAPY blog and on social media such as Facebook and Bluesky:
https://bsky.app/profile/moritherapy.bsky.social

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Last Supper, Growing Hot and Growing Cold, haibun by Isabella Mori in Failed Haiku (Vol. 10, Issue 110, June 2025)

⚡ Heavenly Blue, haibun in Issue 1 of Frazzled Lit (6 October 2024)

⚡ An Interview with Isabella Mori by Sally Quon in The Solitary Daisy (Issue 19, January 2024)

⚡ Craft Interview, Isabella Mori in The Artisanal Writer (1 September 2021)

⚡ The Rougher Side of Cherry Blossoms, guest post by writer-in-residence Isabella Mori at Historic Joy Kogawa House (9 April 2021)

⚡ More Not-So-Pretty Haiku: Impermanence, guest post two of four by WIR Mori (16 April 2021)