Photo by Missy Malouff

Austyn Wohlers was born in Atlanta in 1996. Her first novel, Hothouse Bloom, was called “the rare kind of debut that resets the bar for the field at large” by Blake Butler and “strikingly original” by Mesha Maren in The New York Times.

Her fiction, poetry, translation, and criticism have appeared in The Baffler, Guernica, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. In Baltimore, she ran the Near Future reading series. She is also a musician.

Interview by Nirica Srinivasan

The first thing I’d love to hear about is the influence of Clarice Lispector on your writing. I found Hothouse Bloom so evocative of her—both in the focus on interiority, and in the way you push up against the limits of language. What do you find compelling about Lispector, and how did that affect Hothouse Bloom or the way you approach writing in general?

I hit Lispector really hard in college. The first novel of hers I read was The Passion According to G.H. in a class taught by José Quiroga, my late professor and friend to whom the book is dedicated. I read all her work in an independent study with José and some again as the last New Directions translations came out, except I’ve still only read Rabassa’s translation of The Apple in the Dark.

Later, I had an instructor in an advanced fiction workshop tell me I didn’t understand the basics of fiction, which devastated me as a young writer—I was very desperate to “become a novelist”—and the summer after that class took her biography with me to Quebec, where I was WWOOFing, taking care of sled dogs in the off-season. I remember being very moved by the anecdote that when asked to write a “typical story,” she wrote, “Once upon a time there was a bird, my God.”

I also had hit Hesse really hard and Spinoza a bit as a teenager, and those were big influences on her as a teenager too. It just felt like I found a kindred spirit for what I was trying to do in my work. I liked how she challenged I thought I was supposed to see literature, her intimate experimentalism, her seriousness, simultaneously her play. The feeling her protagonists have of being inexplicably at odds with the world, of trying to articulate or understand that feeling but remaining asymptotically out of reach, was close to how I felt in the world while writing the early drafts of Hothouse Bloom. Over time, funny enough, I have become a lot more like Jan than Anna.

Anna is trying to find a new way to be an artist, in her move to the orchard—to “live a painting instead of making them.” I found it striking that so much of her attempt at creation is dependent on destruction, which is evident in sometimes quite violent language: the “obliteration” of thoughts that don’t serve her, the “destruction “of her identity and history, an attempt at an “annihilation” of the self.

This is also kind of mirrored in the way that her attempt at a “pure” pastoral existence is affected by both the reality of capitalism and the reality of agriculture—“How do you extract something gently from the earth?” Can you talk a bit about that tension and how you see it play out with Anna?

It’s interesting because there’s a lot of what you could call Christian imagery in the book but Christianity is not a huge part of my background; my mother was pretty ‘new age’ and there are probably more Buddhist ideas being reached for in the work and in how I see the world, which gels with the idea of nothingness being the path toward enlightenment.

Of course, Anna thinks she’s on that tip but isn’t really, she’s destroying her life in part because she is ashamed of herself and unwilling to face it. I think when Jan comes into the book, and you get his perspective you can really see her isolation and mania for what it is. Anna’s idea of the pastoral is very much caught up in the image of it.

One book that was very influential in writing Hothouse Bloom to me was Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City, which gets at a lot of those ideas—how the “pure pastoral existence” is fundamentally a fantasy because the country is fundamentally shaped by the needs of the city.

Another tension that I really enjoyed was between the macro and the micro. Anna’s paintings were of zoomed-in and defamiliarized flora and fauna; she thinks, at one point, that “all she could ever take in was the orchard partly viewed.” When she does get to the top of a trail and takes in an aerial view of the land, it disturbs her: “From far away things looked less magical. Things looked like they could be dominated.”

Another way I thought the micro-ness of Hothouse Bloom was challenged is when, in later chapters, you move from Anna’s very focused (third-person) POV to Jan’s, or Gil’s. I’d love to hear more about how you approached that idea of a kind of limited, zoomed-in worldview.

I think the perspective shifts do a lot to release the intensity of being so close up with her throughout the entire novel, to open up that micro-experience into a macro-one as you say. A perspective shift of some short was always within the novel but took a few different forms during its conception. I was influenced by stories where you’re riding really close with a protagonist, they die, and then you get the perspective shift—Things Fall Apart, The Glass Bead Game by Hesse, you could say Lispector’s Hour of the Star in some ways, though of course that’s more of a frame narrative.

Originally, she was killed by a bear and you get the shift when Jan kind of flatly finds her body, but the ending felt too fantastical—like it bought in too much to Anna’s dream of some kind of magical countryside. The new ending actually destroys that dream, and getting the actual interiority of the other characters, who Anna has largely misread throughout the novel, helps to destroy that dream. It also allowed the novel to become much more about perception and phenomenology as such.

You’re also a musician! How do your different forms of art-making interact with each other and feed into each other? Hothouse Bloom is a very textural, vivid novel, and your music is also very textural—how do you approach that kind of thing?

I think sadness, nature, and texture are the things that preoccupy me in the abstract and literature and music are both outlets for those preoccupations. I always say writing is my way of understanding and processing the world, while music is my way of experiencing it, with how much more you collaborate and frankly socialize in that sphere. I definitely go to a lot more shows than readings, for example.

But of course, that’s very simplistic—a lot of processing goes into songwriting and a lot of experiencing goes into literature. It’s funny that reading is known as an ‘introvert’s hobby’ because I feel like my draw to literature was the opposite, a way of not wanting to be alone and getting to listen to someone. So it’s complex. Often, it’s a flight from one form to the other. I get frustrated working on music and can spend some time writing which feels taboo and thus a relief, and vice versa.

Part of Anna’s attempt to erase herself is by refusing history: the history of places she visits, but also her own history. We don’t know very much about her life before she gets to the orchard—only when someone else, like Jan, brings up the past. Anna thinks of a perfect apple: one which “held no history, no genealogy, no ecology, no symbolism.”

On a craft level, how did you approach presenting Anna to the reader as essentially a character without history? There’s something so interesting in knowing so little about her life before the orchard, outside of how she thinks about it.

I’ve always loved novels where a character “steps out of the void” and wanted to do something similar. The craft is fairly simple, you just don’t give it. It helps having a book which is so propelled by Anna’s interiority that we don’t get to have it because it isn’t what she wants to think about and she is trying to force it out of her field of vision.

Can you talk a little about what role failure plays in the book?

Right, failure’s all over the book. It begins and ends in a failure. It is inherent to the tragic form, which I’m very interested in on a formal level, and whose model Christopher Booker outlines in a way I find compelling: anticipation (arriving at the orchard), dream (ability to access this feeling-beyond-the-verbal), frustration (Jan’s arrival), nightmare (profitability) and destruction (McDonald’s).

As a kid I used to watch this movie called Ringing Bell all the time, which I won’t spoil, it’s just 45 minutes and is on YouTube, but I think spurred an interest in both tragedy and pastoral imagery that has followed me all my life. More personally, at the time when I was writing Hothouse Bloom I was obsessively, probably clinically, fearful about my ability to self-actualize and become the kind of person I wanted to be, anxieties which took a long time and a lot of therapy to abate, so maybe part of the initial impulse of the novel was in exploring what actually taking a step back from art production would look like—what “failing” could look like—and how any way of life can be conceived of as a failure if you go about it the right way. Pastoral escapism has a long history, but is definitely in the Zeitgeist right now.

I really, really loved the ending of the novel, which actually kind of reminded me of Pablo Larraín’s Spencer. There’s an obvious parallel—Spencer ends with Princess Diana taking her kids to a KFC—and it kind of symbolizes something totally different than in your book, but like in Hothouse Bloom, it feels like such a jarring change from the mood and feel of the story thus far, a kind of crashing into the real world. How did you find the ending to Hothouse Bloom?

I’m so glad you dug the ending. I honestly have no recollection where it comes from. Probably I was trying to think of the cruellest thing I could do to her. But yes, what you note—“a jarring change from the mood, a kind of crashing into the real world” is exactly what I was going for.

Do you see Hothouse Bloom in conversation with other works (aside from Lispector, of course!)? Was there something you were reading or otherwise engaging with during writing, or that you’ve discovered since?

Graciliano Ramos’s São Bernardo, Henri Bosco’s Malicroix, plenty of romantics but maybe especially Blake and Wordsworth, obviously the transcendentalists, Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment, Faulkner’s work, Pavese’s The Moon and the Bonfires, Cortázar’s work, Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, Ann Quin’s Berg, Virgil’s Eclogues, Gerard de Nerval’s Aurélia, Medbh McGuckian’s work, Mina Loy’s, and all the crazy bitch writers like Anna Kavan and Ottessa Moshfegh and Hilda Hilst. While writing the first drafts of the novel I lived next to a horse farm on the outskirts of Atlanta I would take a break to stare at all the time.

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Nirica Srinivasan is a writer and illustrator from India. She likes stories with ambiguous endings and unreliable narrators.

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