Poet Interview: Devon Bohm

Devon Bohm received her BA from Smith College and earned her MFA with a dual concentration in Poetry and Fiction from Fairfield University. After serving as Mason Road’s Editor-in-Chief, she worked as an adjunct professor of English. She was awarded the 2011 Hatfield Prize for Best Short Story, received an honorable mention in the 2020 L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest, and was long-listed for Wigleaf’s Top Very Short Fictions 2021. Her work has also been featured in publications such as Labrys, Necessary Fiction, Spry and Sixfold. Bohm’s first book of poetry is forthcoming in Fall 2021 from Cornerstone Press. Follow her on Instagram @devonpoem or visit her website at www.devonbohm.com.

When did you become a poet? How did you know it was the right medium for your stories?

I don’t remember a time in my life where I wasn’t writing poems. Before I could fully write, I would scribble what I could and then recite my “poems” for my parents—my first name apparently even means poet. I do also work in fiction and nonfiction, as many poets do, but poetry has always been my primary medium for expressing my own emotions and how I see the world. All the schooling that came later was learning how to edit, new ways of expressing myself, and the best way to communicate the vision in my head to the page.

What inspires you to write, and why? 

Everything. By which I mean it’s the way I navigate the world around me and my own emotional reactions to that world, my experiences and memories—I would write even if no one was ever going to read it. However, what inspires me to work harder on the craft aspect of my work (and actually share it with others) is the experience I have when I read a good poem: as if someone has reached inside me and found the hidden part of me that only I know. Poetry has carried me through the darkest times of my life, and I want to pay it forward and hopefully create poems that can help carry others.

Who are some of your literary or artistic crushes or influences, and why? 

Ada Limón, Carmen Maria Machado, Sally Rooney, Margaret Atwood, and Jenny Slate pop into my head first and foremost. They each have my whole heart as female writers who are doing the deep work—continuously learning about themselves and the world around them through a lens completely individual to their person. And they’re also doing the work of their craft—finding the absolute best (and often unique) way those stories can be best communicated. It’s a delicate balance, and all these women are masters of it—it’s what I will always strive for as a writer…to write the work only I can write.

What are you working on next/what was your last project, and can you tell us a little about it? 

My first book of poetry is due to release in November of 2021 from Cornerstone Press! It’s entitled Careful Cartography and I’ve been working on the poems in the collection since graduate school. This collection is more than a gathering together of my work, but instead a detailed geographic narrative that plots out my autobiography through both external and internal landscapes. These free verse poems create a map through wordscapes that equate to topographical locations, a search culminating in the most elusive and unmappable of locations: a home.

What are some common themes you see in your own work and can you tell us why these themes keep reappearing? 

I write about jellyfish…a lot. (My senior poetry class in college even created an anthology titled “Of Jellyfish and Teeth” because apparently it’s a catching phenomenon.) I think there’s something so otherworldly about them—a creature that might be immortal (well, one species,) but also exists without a traditional brain or teeth or…it’s pure impulse. There’s so many kinds, so many places to find them, and so many different ways to view them. I love a strange fact about the world, and jellyfish are one of the strangest creatures we have—there’s just so many ways to use a jellyfish as a lens to view the world and myself through.

How many unfinished or unpublished books do you have, and tell us about them? 

How long do you have? There’s the half of a dystopian novel that plays with language as freedom, the full novel draft about cluster suicides (far too long at present,) a ghost story/surrealist piece of sorts that’s getting fleshed out, the poetry collection inspired by a painter’s palette, another exploring my own relationship with spirituality, religion, and the ocean…I’m always working on something. Right now it’s the last in the list (and the ghost story on and off,) but I never fully wash my hands of anything—I consider any abandoned work my boneyard, i.e. places to pick through for good ideas, phrases, concepts, or even editing once I’ve taken more time away. Never trash a draft!

Do family and "real life" friends read your work, and how does that make you feel? 

That’s probably the hardest part about publishing—I have no issues at all with strangers reading my work, but I try to stand by my own truth in each piece and that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s another person’s truth. I try to always be respectful and kind, but my story belongs to me and I have to tell it, that’s it. The more I’ve concentrated on that over time the more my friends and family have been accepting of my own right to my own narratives—and the more people outside my circle have responded to my work. I do think you have to give something real in poetry to get that response. Overall, I’m lucky to be so supported, even when the story I’m telling is hard to read.

What does "good poetry" mean to you, and why? 

Good poetry is a piece of writing that you can’t shake off. It follows you, haunts, rattles your bones days, months, years later. It changes the way you see yourself, the world around you, your relationships with others…it creates change within you. It speaks to you beyond the page and lives beyond the page. It defies easy definition, but the whole “you know it when you see it” thing applies to good poetry as much as anything else.

What is your writing process like? 

I usually start by reading. It doesn’t matter what, anything works, but it’s usually another writer’s poetry. I let my mind relax while I’m reading and I write down any words that pop out and make myself a little prompt from those words to get started. Usually, while I’m reading, a first line pops into my head to get me started, or my brain wanders over to a concept I can play with. I think of each poem as having multiple threads that I’m bringing together to create a stronger whole—one thread might be a memory, another might be something I read in the paper today, another an image from my day to day life. I think drawing the parallels of these threads together is what fleshes out my poems. Some things are more straightforward, but most of time for poetry it feels like a huge, collaborative process with the world around me.

How do you research for your poems?

My favorite thing to do when I’m sitting down to write and nothing is coming to mind naturally is look up facts about the natural world. There’s so much to learn that I could never run out of inspiration, and there’s the added bonus that I get to learn something new. A lot of interesting things end up in the boneyard, but then I find myself drawing parallels at later times. Definitely one of the most productive research habits I’ve developed!

Instagram
Books: Careful Cartography, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press in November 2021!
Website