“My mother was a storyteller,” says editor and book marketer Bona Hayes. “I remember she would gather all the kids around at Christmastime and they would listen to her recite poetry. She had a gift for people, and I like to think I’ve gotten that gift from her.”
Both parents had a gift for recital, but from different genres. Her mother would recite “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” while her father would do his rendition of “The Face on the Barroom Floor.”
Her mother had grown up on the Fundy Shore of Nova Scotia, near Truro, and attended a one-room school. After her own teacher training, she married the instructor from her school. The couple moved to the United States and found jobs in Paramus, N.J.
Growing up, Bona had no inkling that she would one day end up in The Villages, the home of so many independent writers.
“After high school I decided to go to the Latin American Institute in New York City. I would become a bilingual secretary and work my way around the world.”
Things didn’t quite work out that way.
“Did I work my way around the world? No. Can I speak Spanish? Yes.” The Spanish training did give Bona an additional sense of rhythm and cadence for the spoken word and other languages.
Corporate computer systems were new in the early 1980s and she worked with a company that sold systems and provided training to auto dealerships. The computers were used mostly in the parts department, replacing the bulky catalogs, and accounting areas.
The economic downturn in the late ‘80s brought her back to Paramus where there were many life changes waiting. She married her “best friend,” Harold, had a son and moved to New Hampshire, settling in Concord, where Bona got her initial exposure to the marketing world in the healthcare industry.
“I worked in a hospital producing marketing collateral—brochures and advertising—along with making the most of PR opportunities and issuing news releases. “Unlike in New Jersey, there was only one TV station in the area, and they were always hungry for news. We were happy to provide.”
It’s a long leap from Concord to The Villages.
“My sister had lived here since 2005, and we had visited her.” When Harold died in 2015 Bona looked south and left snowy New Hampshire in January 2018 for her new, sunny home in the Village of Country Club Hills.
Bona soon joined a writer’s group led by Villager Millard Johnson.
“I went a couple of weeks, learned how the group functioned, and started to write my story about my precious cart who always told the truth. The group redlined it,” she said. “I realized then that writing a press release for information is very different than writing fiction.”
Reading work aloud was part of the group’s critique process. But authors did not read their own work. One day Bona read aloud a piece by Julie Johnson.
“She looked at me later and said, ‘You really know my characters—you are my characters come to life.’” That friendship rekindled Bona’s marketing talents as well as her beginning to work as an editor. She also became friends with Villages authors Jenny Fern, Barbara Rein, and Paula Tucker.
Bona credits her mother’s recital skills. “I could make the words on the page come out. I could make people sound like the way Julie had written them.”
Bona developed a knack for writing log lines—a one sentence summary of a book, movie, or TV show plot and emotional hook. “Most authors want to tell the whole story using a lot more words,” she acknowledges.
Attending the 2019 Florida Writers Association conference—the conference theme was marketing—Bona and Julie Johnson became a writer-editor-marketer team. “It’s like puzzle pieces. We have different strengths that mesh together well.” Writing under the pen name “J.J. Clarke,” Johnson’s mystery/suspense books feature probation officer Kate Anderson as a part-time crime solver. The first book in the series, “Dared to Run,” recently won a 5-star Chanticleer Book Review award. It is available on Amazon.
One of Bona’s other passion is music. “I love music. I sing. In New Hampshire I sang with a group of about 70 women who learned to sing in the African tradition—a call-and-response form. We learned to sing in four-part harmony.”
Another of her passions is leading spirituality seminars for women. “We go through life being nurturers and we tend to put the needs of our children and partners ahead of our own. Then I think we reach a point in our lives when we say, ‘What’s next? What’s Chapter Five?’ This is when we discover who we are and what we want to be. I love to help people discover that.”
The big question Bona askes in the seminar: “What’s the one thing you would do if you weren’t afraid?” Often the answer she receives is, “I’m going to write a book.” She also adds that it’s not just women who are searching for ‘Chapter Five.’ “Men often have careers that don’t translate into retirement, but it seems easier for women to talk about it openly.”
While Bona’s ‘Chapter Five’ seems to be coming together, she still has more ambitions. “I want to do TED talks about ‘let your light shine.’ I want to walk out on stage, and everybody is clapping, and I’d say ‘I’m so glad to be here. Let me tell you my story. Come on this trip with me.’”
John W Prince is a writer and Villager. For more information visit www.HallardPress.com. If you know of someone with a “Good Story and a Good Book,” contact him at John@HallardPress.com.
