This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Austyn Wohlers, whose debut novel, Hothouse Bloom, is out today from Hub City Press. Hothouse Bloom follows a young woman who renounces her painting career and all her human relationships to become one with her late grandfather’s apple orchard. Anna arrives at the orchard with the intention to abstain from social life, deverbalize her experience, and adapt her consciousness to the rhythms of trees. She succeeds for a time, until the arrival of her old friend Jan, who is nomadic, vibrant, and working on a book about the painter Charles Burchfield. Alarmed by Anna’s isolation and declining health, he tries to get Anna to paint again, while Anna is determined to show him the orchard as she sees it. As the harvest approaches, the external world descends in the form of pickers, contractors, neighbors, and pomologists, and Anna realizes that the only way back to her pastoral life is to turn a profit. Kirkus Reviews called Hothouse Bloom “gorgeous, erudite, and ungoverned.” Debutiful wrote, “Hothouse Bloom is a lush exploration of isolation, fixation, and the insidious ways capitalism seeps into our private lives. Wohlers packs a lot into this slim novel. While you may finish it in one sitting, it will stay with you for much, much longer.” Austyn Wohlers was born in Atlanta in 1996. Her writing has appeared in the Baffler, the Massachusetts Review, Guernica, and elsewhere. She is also a musician, releasing music alone and with the band Tomato Flower.
Austyn Wohlers, author of Hothouse Bloom. (Credit: Missy Malouff)
1. How long did it take you to write Hothouse Bloom?
All in all, about four years. I put the book down for a year and a half after writing the first two drafts.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I wanted the language to peter out alongside Anna’s dream, starting out very lush and psychedelic and ending with a kind of bleak realism. It was difficult to consciously modulate the prose like that.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
In New York I write a lot at the Center for Fiction. Otherwise, at home. Different projects demand different times of day for me. Hothouse was very much a late-morning novel, but the book I’m working on now is more of a night novel. When I’m actively working on a draft, I work every day, but when I’m not, such as when I’m working on music, I sometimes go long periods without writing at all.
4. What are you reading right now?
I’m finishing up Rob Chapman’s biography of Syd Barrett, A Very Irregular Head, and leafing through Kenneth Rexroth’s translations of Japanese and Chinese poetry from New Directions.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
J. J. Phillips for her novel Mojo Hand.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Work.
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you?
More so than anything specific they have said, their support and enthusiasm for this novel and my vision for it has meant the world.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Hothouse Bloom, what would you say?
Get on Zoloft.
9. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of Hothouse Bloom?
A lot of visual art, including Burchfield’s paintings and the cover art for Wolfgang Voigt’s Gas albums, which are the inspiration behind Anna’s paintings. I listened almost exclusively to Jefre Cantu-Ledesma’s Bloodstream Sermon and Love Is a Dream (with Xela) while writing.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Two come to mind, both given to me by mentors. One, there are going to be many days you don’t feel like working on it, and you’re going to have to sit down and make something happen with the page. Two, you can’t edit something into being good before getting it down.
