An avid outdoorsman and newspaper sports writer and columnist, College of Arts & Sciences adjunct instructor Christopher Knauss recently published “Shore-Ku, Haiku inspired by the Eastern Shore,” based on his experiences quietly observing life on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
An avid outdoorsman and newspaper sports writer and columnist, College of Arts & Sciences adjunct instructor Christopher Knauss recently published “Shore-Ku, Haiku inspired by the Eastern Shore,” based on his experiences quietly observing life on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
“I became interested in the form of haiku poetry because it’s concise and usually involves nature, which I like to learn about,” says Knauss, who is also the cooperative education coordinator for the college. “It’s also something that you can do in your head while you’re driving and I drive around the Eastern Shore a lot, for work and for pleasure. When I saw something that was interesting, I tried to represent it in 17 syllables, and I could usually remember it enough to write it down when I got to a computer.”
The book is divided into four chapters, one for each season. The haiku offer many reflections on wildlife, which is traditional for that style of poetry, but he’s also added such themes as sports, cars, children (his own included), and other tiny snapshots of rural life.
He notes he enjoys taking photographs, and many are sprinkled throughout the pages in black and white. “I softened them up a bit using a watercolor filter in Photoshop,” he adds.
Knauss says he worked on the book, on and off, for about 10 years. He is currently working to create a nature center in northern Caroline County, Maryland, and he says he wanted to get the book completed so he could focus on that project.
“I really enjoyed the process,” he says of putting the book together. “It’s a bit autobiographical and I got to chronicle my family life a bit. Overall, I’m pretty happy with the final result and I think it does a fairly good job of representing life on the Eastern Shore.”
“Shore-Ku,” is published by Sandy Isle Books of Goldsboro, Maryland.