Jaye Wells

Hi everybody!

Some of you may not know that before deadlines and social networking competed for my attention I was a quite active blogger. During my blogging heyday, I made several great friends who were also writers–all aspiring. I’m happy to say that I’m not the only one of our motely confederacy that has since landed a publishing contract. Some of my cohorts include Jamie Ford (Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet), Sean Ferrel (Numb, out next month) and now, Sarah Hina, whose novel Plum Blossoms in Paris released a just a couple of weeks ago.

I became a fan of Sarah’s writing immediately. She doesn’t just write words–she paints with them. Her prose is evocative and visceral and lovely. I couldn’t be more thrilled to have her with us today to share the vignette that made me a devoted Sarah Hina fan. Enjoy and welcome to Sarah!

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I met Jaye back in November of 2007, when I first started Murmurs.

Naming my blog was the easy part.  Though I was drawn to the vibrant writing community forming around Jason Evans’ Clarity of Night contests—where Jaye and I had enjoyed some success—and though I had already finished writing Plum Blossoms in Paris, I was still tentative about sharing my work with the world at large.  I didn’t so much plunge into the pool, as dip a toe in; I didn’t shout, but murmur.

Jaye left a comment on the first vignette I posted for my “4 Days and 3 Nights in Paris” series.  And I don’t have to look back in my archives to remember what her exact words were: Wow . . . just wow. They meant that much to me.  And still do.  Not because I believed the piece to be extraordinary.  But because I was searching for a hand in the dark to reassure me that I belonged there.  That I was really a writer.  And Jaye was among the first to offer me one.

It didn’t hurt, of course, that she was such a damn fine writer herself.

Blogging quickly became the centerpiece of my writing life, and to a great extent, has remained my focus over the past two and a half years.  And maybe it shouldn’t have.  Maybe I should have been working harder on that next novel. Yet I can’t bring myself to regret a single story, poem, or shamelessly sentimental post about my kids.  Blogging has streamlined my prose, encouraged experimentation, and made me a bolder and more confident writer.  I really do consider it a classroom of sorts, with each student taking her turn as teacher, too.

Still, all that pales in comparison to the friendships I’ve made, the people I’ve laughed with and cared for, and the many hands offered—and taken—that encircle this smaller, if more brilliant, world of ours.

And that is worth shouting about.

Jaye has graciously allowed me to re-post that first vignette here.  And though my fingers are itching to revise some things, I’ve kept its original content intact. Le Pont Neuf is the oldest bridge in Paris.

Le Pont Neuf

The lights on our bridge look lonely tonight.

I am lonely tonight.

Lovers pass like fireflies. Incandescent hearts. Collars raised, they are close with their heat.

The quay cobblestone is cold and hard, my knuckles curled between its grooves, palms raised.

In America, it is autumn. The leaves tremble for an anxious fate, while someone strums nostalgia’s dissonant chord.

But spring was our prelude in the celestial city, and summer our pas a deux. This season is the absence of sound. The Seine murmurs, but I cannot hear her silver tongue. The leaves lie, quiet, on the ground. I cannot recollect that which has not happened.

And the Eiffel Tower still shimmers like a shattered diamond across my shoulder.

And the flocking tourists still squawk too loud.

And the musician still plucks his instrument’s nerves.

And the air still smells of your perfume.

And my heart screams your name.

Our bridge still stands.

It has been standing for hundreds of years.

I will wait.

(I am still so young)