West Hartford author received prestigious honor – Hartford Courant

West Hartford – A story titled kitsune, by West Hartford resident Devon Bohm won the author a Writers of the Future award and will be published in the L. Ron Hubbard introduces the writers of future volume 39Next spring.

Bohm said she was “in shock” when she learned she had won the award.

“I’ve entered this specific competition probably five times,” she said. “I already got two honorable mentions, one with this story. I resubmitted it, because I was working on my poetry, so I didn’t have time to write anything new in fiction recently, so I decided to edit the story and resubmit it, because I thought it was a strong story.”

A poet and writer for as long as she can remember, Bohm graduated from Smith College and earned her master’s degree in poetry and fiction from Fairfield University. She said she just always knew she was a writer.

“I never wanted to do anything other than be a writer,” she said, adding that she had held adjacent jobs including teaching writing and English, but that she had no interest in working in areas unrelated to writing.

“There’s never been anything else that interests me. I’ve worked in other jobs, because that’s what being a writer is like,” she said, “but I’ve never wanted to do something other than write fiction and poetry.”

Currently, she is taking a break as she is expecting her first child in December.

kitsune is what Bohm calls “speculative fiction” and is based on the Japanese lore of foxes who can transform into women.

“The story takes place in the very near future,” she said. “A young woman in her thirties tries to figure out what she is doing with her life, and things get bogged down. Then the foxes, which in this world have disappeared, begin to return. There’s something very mystical and mysterious about what’s going on, because it’s not just foxes that are native to her area, it’s all kinds of foxes, including some she’s never seen before. , and at the same time, women begin to disappear. This mystery occurs as she tries to unravel the mystery of her own life.

The majority of Bohm’s work, she says, deals with feminist issues. She said she had never written from a male perspective.

“We have a lot of that in this world, so I try to write female stories, from a female perspective,” she said. “That’s what I can speak from experience. I can add my voice without blocking the voice of others.

Four writers each quarter earn the honor. All 16 will travel to Hollywood, California next spring for a week-long masterclass, and stories will be judged by authors including Tim Powers (author of About Stranger Tides), Kevin J. Anderson and Brian Herbert (Dunes prequel series), Robert J. Sawyer (quantum night), Brandon Sanderson (Born of the Mists series, The Stormlight Archive), Larry Niven (Ringworld), Orson Scott Card (Ender’s game), Nnedi Okorafor (who is afraid of death), David Farland (rune lords) and Katherine Kurtz (Deryni series).

Currently, she is working on a play, potentially her first full-length novel, set in Rhode Island. It’s a ghost story, which is a bit of a departure for her.

“It’s something I haven’t really tried to do before,” she said. “I had a hard time finding the horror that I really like, so I’m trying to write one that I really like.”

After the 1982 release of his internationally acclaimed best-selling science fiction novel, battlefield landwritten to celebrate 50 years as a professional writer, Hubbard created the Writers of the Future in 1983 to provide aspiring speculative fiction writers with a way to get that much-needed break.

For more information, visit www.devonbohm.com Where www.writersofthefuture.com.