BUSINESS SENSE: Top 10 reasons to shop local for the holidays

Francis can often be found at Blake’s Books in McKinleyville.

ANNETTE MAKINO, TIMES-STANDARD, EUREKA, CA, Nov. 14, 2021

Almost three-quarters of all online shopping journeys now start with Amazon—and it’s easy to see why. The selection, convenience and price are truly tempting. 

But as the holidays approach, let’s consider the top ten reasons to shop local, especially from Humboldt artists and craftspeople. 

1. It keeps your money local. Studies show that independent retailers return more than three times as much to the local economy than chain stores. My greeting cards are printed at Bug Press in Arcata, so every card sale represents income to a local printer.

2. It makes for a vibrant community. We’ve all passed through those sad, lifeless towns that are just a collection of chain stores and strip malls. Shopping local supports the quirky, one-of-kind retailers that make Humboldt lively and unique.

3. It’s way more fun to shop local. Walk into the Holly Yashi Store and a staffer will offer you a free cappuccino. At Blake’s Books, you may be greeted by Francis, a sweet Bedlington Terrier. Stop by Dick Taylor Craft Chocolate and pick up a sampler of their bean-to-bar artisanal chocolate. Visit an artist in their studio and learn about their process.

4. You get more expertise. Unlike Amazon bots, independent store owners have to know their stuff. If you’re considering buying a fruit tree, Humboldt nurseries know what will grow best where. If you want to buy a book for your seven-year old niece who’s into dinosaurs, talk to your local bookseller.

5. Your purchases are more meaningful. Whether it’s a Bigfoot sweatshirt or a jar of Slug Slime from Los Bagels, local products come with a story. Also consider making gifts of experience, like a kayak tour of Humboldt Bay, a visit to the Redwood Sky Walk, or a gift certificate to The Larrupin’ Café. Or make a donation to Food for People in someone’s name.

6. Your items will be unique. That cozy wool hat knitted by a local craftsperson is much more special than a generic version anyone could find at Target. And your uncle who has everything would still love a bottle of locally distilled Redwood Rye or Jewell Gin.

7. It reduces your carbon footprint. Your locally purchased items are less likely to have been shipped from far away. Humboldt-based businesses also make far more local purchases for their own needs. And these stores are usually situated in walkable city centers instead of the outskirts of town.

8. Local products are ethically made. Mail order or big box products may have been manufactured in an overseas sweatshop or using questionable environmental practices. But Humboldt-made generally means responsibly sourced.

9. Humboldt stores support Humboldt nonprofits. Whether it’s donating raffle items, paying for sports team uniforms or making grants, local businesses are much more generous in supporting local charities than their big box counterparts.

10. It feels good to do good. It may cost a few bucks more, but it means a lot to know your money is being spent where it will really count.

Due to Covid, many of our arts and crafts fairs are canceled this season. But you can still find locally made products at the Made in Humboldt fair at Pierson’s and at independent retailers, grocery stores and art galleries. Buy local and enjoy happy Humboldt holidays!

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Annette Makino is an Arcata-based artist who runs Makino Studios, offering cards, prints and calendars of her art. She confesses that her new book, Water and Stone: Ten Years of Art and Haiku, is available on Amazon, as well as makinostudios.com and in local stores.  

‘Water and Stone’: Arcata artist publishes first full-length collection of art and haiku

Pictured is the cover of Annette Makino's new book, "Water and Stone." College Cove is seen in the background.

EUREKA TIMES-STANDARD, EUREKA, CA, AUGUST 25, 2021

In this fractured world, a new book by award-winning haiku poet and artist Annette Makino hopes to provide a dose of Zen wisdom and humor. “Water and Stone: Ten Years of Art and Haiku” is a full-color collection that spans a decade of Makino’s paintings and poems.

“As I celebrated 10 years as a working artist this year, I decided to publish a book of the best of my art and haiku over that time,” Makino said. “Locals will recognize many beloved Humboldt landscapes like Moonstone Beach, College Cove, the Klamath River and Redwood National Park, plus native plants and animals.”

“Water and Stone” features 50 haiga — artworks combined with haiku — painted with Japanese watercolors and sumi ink. In the first full-length collection of her art and haiku, Makino finds beauty and meaning in the everyday world, be it the rhythm of ocean waves, the bittersweet joys of parenting or a traumatized rescue dog.

Sprinkled throughout the collection are 15 haibun — autobiographical prose pieces that include haiku. While deeply personal, these touch on universal themes such as the quest for meaningful work, finding love, raising a family, growing older and considering a place in the world.

Stephen Addiss, author of “The Art of Haiku,” has praised the book, saying, “With the publication of ‘Water and Stone,’ Annette Makino takes her place among the leaders of haiku painting (haiga).”

Annette Makino.

Makino is an award-winning haiku poet and artist based in Arcata who combines Japanese-inspired paintings and collages with her poems. Her work has appeared in the leading English-language haiku and haiga journals and anthologies. Makino’s poems have won honors in the Touchstone Awards, the Henderson Haiku Contest, the Brady Senryu Contest, the Porad Haiku Award, and the Jane Reichhold International Prize, among others.

Through the art business she founded in 2011, Makino Studios, she shares her haiga and offers prints, greeting cards and calendars of her art.

Published by Makino Studios, “Water and Stone” is 124 pages and features full color. It is sold in Eureka at Eureka Books, Eureka Natural Foods and the North Coast Co-op; in Arcata at the North Coast Co-op, Northtown Books, Plaza and Wildberries Marketplace; in McKinleyville at Blake’s Books, Eureka Natural Foods and Miller Farms; and in Trinidad at the Trinidad Trading Company. The book is also available at www.makinostudios.com or amazon.com for $24.99 plus tax and shipping.

For more information, visit www.makinostudios.com or call 707-362-6644.

‘The ultimate affirmation’: Artist, poet Annette Makino wins a coveted Touchstone Award from the Haiku Foundation

This collage by Annette Makino is made from painted and torn Japanese washi papers. Featuring a view of the Klamath River, it incorporates her winning one-line haiku.

BY HEATHER SHELTON, TIMES-STANDARD, EUREKA, CA, APRIL 25, 2021

April 17 was International Haiku Poetry Day and, on that day, artist and poet Annette Makino received exciting news.

Makino, of Arcata, was awarded one of the highest honors for English-language haiku, a Touchstone Award from the Haiku Foundation. The annual award recognizes the best individual poems published each previous year.

“I’m thrilled that my haiku has won this award,” Makino said. “You should have heard the whooping from my house! I’ve been studying and writing haiku for 10 years now, and this feels like the ultimate affirmation that I’m getting the hang of it.”

This year, there were 1,302 poems nominated from 31 countries for the Touchstone Award.

“The Touchstone Award is unique as far as I know in that the poems must have won an award or been selected for publication before they can even be considered for nomination,” Makino said. “And most of the nominations come from haiku editors, not the poets themselves. So, it’s really the creme de la creme of all the haiku written in English that year. My husband refers to it as the Nobel Prize for haiku.”

Makino says her haiku was eligible to be nominated because it won the Porad Haiku Award sponsored by Haiku Northwest last fall. To read all of the Touchstone Award for Individual Poems winners for 2020, go to https://thehaikufoundation.org/touchstone-awards-for-individual-poems-2020.

Makino — whose work regularly appears in the leading journals and anthologies of haiku in English — wrote her Touchstone Award-winning one-line haiku while on a recent creative retreat at the Klamath River in Orleans. It reads:

long before language the S of the river

“I was walking along Ishi Pishi Road with my husband during a weeklong vacation/art retreat last summer. I looked down at the Klamath River, which parallels the road, and saw a beautiful S-shaped curve,” Makino said.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has gotten me thinking about big questions like human existence and mortality,” she added. “It occurred to me that the river was flowing long before our species came along, and will continue to flow long after our extinction. When I feel too caught up in our human dramas, there is something comforting in that knowledge.”

Artist and haiku poet Annette Makino is at work in her studio. (Photo by Brandi Easter)

Makino — whose haiku have won many other awards — first got involved with writing haiku in 2010 when her friend, Amy Uyeki, gave her a book that she and her mother had produced featuring poems by Uyeki’s Japanese grandmother.

“This introduced me to haiku and senryu, haiku’s humorous cousin,” Makino said. “From Amy, I also learned about the Japanese tradition of haiga, art combined with haiku. I soon started experimenting with writing my own poems and painting haiga.”

Makino says she loves how a haiku can convey so much in three lines or fewer.

“It’s a deceptively simple art form with great depth that rewards re-reading,” she said. “And in describing a unique personal experience or observation, a good haiku can connect to something universal. There is an intangible exchange between the poet and the reader.

“Most of us are sadly mis-taught that an English-language haiku needs to follow a five-seven-five syllable pattern,” she said. “In fact, that formula is based on a misunderstanding of how Japanese sound-syllables relate to English. Most serious haiku poets don’t follow this syllable count, writing shorter poems that more closely match the feel of Japanese haiku. There are other aspects of a haiku that are much more important and harder to master, such as the juxtaposition of two images or ideas.”

For the past decade, Makino has also run her business, Makino Studios, through which she sells her art (both Japanese watercolors and Japanese-inspired collages) and haiku in the form of cards and calendars in stores and online. She hopes to participate — as in years past — in some fairs and festivals in late 2021 if it is safe to do so.

“This past year, I have focused on creating collages using Japanese washi papers that I paint and other found papers like old letters, book pages, vintage stamps and maps,” she said. “I’m also having fun incorporating natural objects like feathers or sand dollars. And most of my pieces include an original haiku.

This collage by Annette Makino includes her original haiku: “bright green needles/on the fire-scarred redwood—/what we’ve each survived.” It is made with hand-painted rice paper printed with redwood twigs and ferns, sumi ink, acrylic paint, vintage Japanese letters and glue on illustration board.

“When I’m creating, I love how things can come together unexpectedly,” Makino said. “There is a lot of serendipity involved, especially in collage. For instance, I recently created a collage to go with a haiku about a fire-scarred redwood. I was happy to find a piece of rice paper with a big streak of black sumi ink on it to represent the burnt tree, and I came across some other papers that I had printed on a gel press using redwood twigs and ferns. I tore a couple of hand-written letters from 1920s Japan into vertical strips to represent trees in the background. It was a case where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

Makino is now at work on her first full-length book with the working title “Water and Stone,” to be published in the early summer. The book, a culmination of a decade of painting and writing, will feature 50 of her haiga, painted with Japanese watercolors and sumi ink.

“I’ve always been a bookworm and a writer. Even as a kid, I wanted to publish books — about what, I had no idea,” she said.

“My art business, Makino Studios, is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. As I mark a decade as a working artist and haiku poet,” Makino said, “it struck me that I could capture the best of my creative work over this time in a full-color book.”

She added, “It’s been a satisfying process to go through all my art and haiku and decide what to include. After I chose 50 pieces, I felt that the rhythm of so many haiku in a row was a bit monotonous. So, I drew from the past 10 years of Makino Studios blog posts and wrote 15 haibun, a Japanese literary form combining autobiographical prose with haiku. These are short vignettes or essays that will weave through the book. It was a challenge to learn a whole new writing technique, but I’m happy with the results, as I think these pieces add a lot of texture and depth to the book.”

For more information about Makino and her work, visit www.makinostudios.com or call 707-362-6644.