Under the Bashō has sunsetted

In August 2025, one of my haiku (with the first line of "adoption papers") got accepted and published online by the Under the Bashō haiku journal. Last month, while searching for haiku journals open to submissions, I saw on ChillSubs that Under the Bashō had been "archived", which is ChillSubs' recent way to flag journals that are no longer active, previously dubbed "defunct". I checked and confirmed that their website was no longer active.

Of course, as is good practice for anyone getting published, I have PDFs saved of the issues or website pages on which my creative writing has been released. So, it is a consolation that I didn't lose that proof that my haiku was published on Under the Bashō in August 2025. There are many journals out there, and many have been active for quite a long time. It is a fact of the business that there is no guarantee that any particular journal will be able to stay active, and publishers can sunset their activities due to any myriad of reasons. Even so, it's still sad that Under the Bashō is no longer a part of the active cohort.

When I confirmed the journal's inactivity, I then searched for it online to see if there was some sort of discourse about the closure out there. I was excited to find a website, The Living Haiku Anthology, that had saved Under the Bashō haiku! Wow, the haiku community is amazing and came out in force for this one. According to The Living Haiku Anthology, "Under the Bashō has been closed down having been first created in 2013. The annual issues from 2013 to 2020, 2022 to 2025 have been converted into PDFs for each year of publication".

All of the Under the Bashō content saved can be found on The Living Haiku Anthology's website here: https://livinghaikuanthology.com/flipbook-library/under-the-bash%C5%8D-issues.html

My haiku can be found on page 10 of the 2025 issue PDF.

Under the Bashō was the first journal to accept and publish one of my haiku, which is an important milestone in my development as a published writer. To branch out from free verse poetry into the welcoming realm of modern haiku has been an inspiring endeavor, and I continue to write and seek to get my haiku published. And so, Under the Bashō will always have a special place in my portfolio, and I am eternally grateful to the volunteers who released these PDFs online so I have some sort of issue to point readers to for that haiku.