Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff - Personal Life

Personal Life

Bohnhoff, mother of three, has been married since 1981 to Jeff Bohnhoff. The couple and their children are members of the Bahá'í Faith. She began her interest in science fiction after watching The Day the Earth Stood Still as a child. Her mother was a singer and music was a predominant passion over writing, through her high school and college days.

Over a decade after her high school experience of being pressured to choose between practical subjects and the arts of music and writing, Bohnhoff wrote an autobiographical essay "But My Mother Was a Singer" in which she chronicles her struggle with the question and argues that though the Bahá'í teachings include an emphasis on the importance of the arts and earning a livelihood by one's calling, "… using our cultural criteria, the arts may seem to have little to do with survival. But they have a tremendous amount to do with 'carrying forward an ever advancing civilization'." Eventually she held a day job as an Instructional Designer and Manager for Kelly Services for some years but bosses would either "urge me to give up music" or told her "You don't belong here" while co-workers would misunderstand the life of the artist — "'If you are any good, what are you doing working here?'" "Minor setbacks", Bohnhoff continues, "in my 'career' provided intensely embarrassing situations at work."

On the musical side the drive to do music "…took me through years of food stamps and rice cakes, the disappointment and frustration of losing band members and starting over…" as well as taking her through "… the inertia when playing 'wall paper' music … the 'top 40' club act". Along with such struggles is the spiritual one of purity of motive — "I, too, love applause, and to me the act of sharing music is more rewarding than writing it" and which genre of music was spiritual? She writes that at one point, eight months pregnant, she had an opportunity to work at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley for "fifteen hour days" but learned that "…I was a musician and a writer by natural inclination, not a celebrity" and "found a deeper understanding of Bahá'u'lláh's admonition to be independent of all save God." She resolves the conflict noting "Any musician who has heard a song come to life out of the weave of rhythm and melody, any writer who has ever created a set of characters, any painter who has laid brush to canvas, any sculptor who has ever been up to his elbows in clay or marble dust, any woman who has ever given birth to a child, any and all have experienced something central to understanding the love that motivated the First Creator." Bohnhoff writes using an Apple Inc. PowerBook.

Bohnhoff is now a full-time writer, working alone and in collaboration with Michael Reaves.