I met Austyn Wohlers last year at a reading, where she told a beautiful story about film and loneliness. A few months later, I read her debut novel, Hothouse Bloom. It’s a lush, impressionistic story of a woman—a painter—looking for solace and, like most of us, not quite finding it. Not long after that initial reading, I heard her perform ambient music for her self-titled project at the Living Gallery in Brooklyn. I caught up with her after she’d spent the first half of this year touring with her band Tomato Flower. We met in a painter’s apartment where she’d been dog sitting. She made me coffee and we sat in a room surrounded by half-painted canvases and easels. 

Have you written about jobs? 

Yeah, I published a few flash fiction pieces in my friend Joey’s magazine R&R about work. I have a story in the Florida Review from when I worked in the archives and it was sort of a detective among the documents type piece. 

Kind of a Borges thing? 

Yeah a little bit. Sort of like this political plot and someone trying to cover it up. 

Ah, so a little Dan Brown? 

Exactly. Haha.

Anna is a painter. What made you write about a visual artist?

I think art for Anna functions as the catalyst for something she’s trying to run from. The questions of art aren’t necessarily questions central to the novel. For Anna was a means of escaping consciousness until it became detrimental. I like the perceptive element of writing about a visual artist. She sees things like a painter does and compartmentalizes the world into color and light. It was a way of making a character very delicate. I think art is interesting to write about because it’s bound in a certain idealism but scenes can get competitive and toxic. It’s a battle to keep it in the original realm of freedom and pleasure. So it’s part of how Anna sees the world but it’s also a source of pain. Also when I was writing the novel I was having a lot of doubt about my ability to self-actualize as an artist and that came out in some ways. I’m working on a book now about a sculptor. I’ve written several stories about film. I think I’m a very visual person. I like visual metaphors in prose but I don’t work in visual forms. But it’s less about art and more about vehicles for flight.

You told me at some point you were writing a novel about a land artist. Is that the one you’re working on now? 

Yeah! It’s about an alcoholic ex-sculptor that’s seduced into working on a Christian land art project that is actually a prison. Super desert paranoid novel. Pynchon, Bolaño, that kind of world. It’s really centered on the seduction and it’s really about love. Everything in the novel is put on the line for this women’s obsession with this guy. 

In HB, Anna wants escape. That’s really at the heart of it. From other people but mostly from herself. Tell me about “Getting Away” as a story we tell ourselves. 

I was reading Raymond Williams' The Country and The City, Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden. The Williams’ is about how we have this idealized version of the country as this place removed from the city. But it’s actually the country that’s shaped by the city. So this idea of returning to a farm, closing off from the world and living in paradise is fundamentally a fiction. And The Machine in the Garden is about interruptive technologies in literature. The famous example it gives is the train in Walden. Also, Levinas’ On Escape was a big one I was reading at the time. There’s this great part about nausea and how nausea is trying to flee from yourself. You see it come up a lot in literature. Obviously, the Sartre book.

But you mean characters literally being nauseous? 

Yeah as a reaction to a sort of existential fear. That’s a trope I really like. It’s a bit cliche but…

I thought about that while reading it. That we can’t really escape from anything. But in your book specifically, it kind of dismantles “cottage-core” Zoomer fantasies.

Everybody wants to raise goats in the woods and say fuck this. 

True. I feel that more living in New York. I grew up in a rural place and couldn’t wait to leave but now I realize that having a boring life is kind of the best thing for you. 

It’s a lot better for making art. I find it really hard to make art in New York.

I really have become skeptical of “being an artist” here. Eventually, everyone goes upstate. 

Baltimore has a beautiful literary scene. It’s cheap to live there and has the best reading series I’ve ever gone to.

Hidden Palace? 

Yeah. Really good. But in Baltimore everyone seemed to organize their life very austerely so they could make work. It’s hard to do that here. But here (apartment) Stephen, the painter who owns this place, he’s got tons of space. He just works here all day and I come by sometimes. So it can be done but I think you really have to struggle for it. 

You do feel somewhat captive here. Most writers I know don’t really do anything. They don’t leave their house much. Do you feel like Anna at all? Wanting to flee? 

The internet is real here. My friend said the other day he’s moving to Vermont because he said in New York you live in culture. He wants culture to be something he can partake in. But yeah I started the book when I was 22. I’m 28 now. I felt a lot more like Anna at the time than I do now. Had a lot more anxieties about self-actualizing and repulsion towards the world. Honestly, I was struggling with a lot of mental illness. It definitely came out of this yearning to go be a shepherdess or a nun.

I envy people who live in monasteries. Having no obligation but to be in this one place and do this one thing. Did you grow up religious? 

My mom is very psychedelic. She was into Kabbalah, astrology, I think we briefly went to a Bahá’í church. 

What’s that? 

It’s a religion that sort of takes from all of them. So I had a woo-woo crystal mom. I went to an Episcopal school for a bit but I didn’t fit in there.

Were you ever curious about going to a Christian church? 

I was pretty agnostic from the get-go. I don’t think Christianity ever called to me. I went to Notre Dame for my MFA. I think Catholic and Orthodox rituals are very beautiful, but if there’s any spirituality I adhere to it’s probably a vague watered-down Western Zen thing.

You ever read Byung-Chul Han? He wrote The Burnout Society. I’m over simplifying, but but he writes about the idea of doing nothing. We’re always told to be productive, monetize all of our interests. But there’s no time to just be quiet and waste time. You need that.

I will say, I’ve sort of been wasting time these last four days. I haven’t had to work and I’m on a five day fast. There is something about that that makes you feel close to a god. This is the third time I’ve done it. There is something about having to endure. I’m also quitting nicotine so every second — although I’m feeling great today — but the first few days I was like okay I’m gonna lay down, watch a movie, see friends. I’m not gonna put any pressure on myself to do anything but get through the day. And you’re right, we never do that.

Do you have a specific writing process? 

For Hothouse it was super outlined. I was really scared to write a novel so I made an intense map: these five scenes in this chapter; all I have to do is get from one scene to the next. That made it a bit structurally rigid so in a way that I had to smooth out later. It’s such an interior novel so I was like, this is gonna affect this change in her, etc. It had to be corrected. With the book I’m working on now, and I’d say more recently the more I write the less I use an outline. I’ll have a vague idea of where things are going but I feel a lot more in control. 

Would you say you’re a voicey writer? Do you start with sentences? 

Language-based for sure. I don’t know if it’s voice. For a long time I was dedicated to third-person. 

Any specific authors you revisit often? 

I’m not a huge re-reader but I’ll pull up certain books and reference them. A lot of Gary Indiana. Lispecter, of course. Septology. In general I like to keep it movin’ with writers. 

Gary Indiana. I picked up Fire Season a few months ago, loved it. I haven’t read his fiction but the essays are great. 

The fiction is great, too. With the book I’m working on now I’m definitely inspired by Horse Crazy. And Do Everything in the Dark. In both books there’s this level of intellectual pessimism, optimism of the will. This thing of, the world is fucked but we try to love each other anyway even though we know it’s not going to fix the problem. I think there’s a degree of pessimism but humanism. I like the way he sees the world. 

His criticism feels voice-driven in a way that’s so hard to do. Almost like reading a column more than a review. I go back to them because of how he thinks. 

Totally. 

*

Reprinted from “Hothouse Bloom” Copyright © 2025 by Austyn Wohlers. Used with permission of the publisher, Hub City Press. All rights reserved.

Not long after sunrise in the deep wet morning there was a pounding at the door. It jolted her awake. Sleepy she thought for a moment it might be the very heartbeat of the house’s wood, finally alive like everything else…She rolled over. She was still sore from driving. The room was dim and vaguely green from the sun radiating through the bamboo in the window. 

She shivered out of the musty yellow sheets. Her breath seemed to coagulate in the air in front of her. She strained her body against the cold. She stumbled out into the brightness of the living room, which was in fact the brightness of the day, but her mind stayed in the night. She had had her usual dreams. Nightmares of encroachment. As a child she’d dreamed of cars crashing through the windows of her house, as an adult that some malevolent stranger would burst through the doors of her apartment. Now she dreamed of dark figures at the edges of a field. 

More pounding. Her clothes were still in a bag by the front door. She put on a hat, a jacket, a second pair of pants. Someone at the door. Then she looked around for something she could use to defend herself, if it came to that. A hammer in a cabinet…She tried to peek through the window but the angle was too sharp to see who was knocking. She was unused to the nakedness of solitude, she was afraid, and the round eyes of the orchard were on her. 

Ridiculous, she thought, fingering the wood handle of the hammer.

As she opened the door she was confronted with a man on the porch, compact and muscular, ruddy, his wiry curly hair drawn back into a cloudcolored ponytail, though she sensed it had been dark in his youth. He said good morning with enthusiasm and in one fluid movement tried to enter the cabin. 

She shut the door halfway. 

He took a step backward. 

“It’s Gil,” he said, like she should know. 

She stood watching him and held the hammer behind the door. She eyed the plastic grocery bag in his hand.

“Remind me your name? Anna?” he said. “I took care of the place after Joe died. No one told you?” He moved further back, half out of the cabin’s shadows and into light. “Just to thin buds, spray copper, make sure the pipes don’t freeze.”

“No, no one told me,” she lied.

“Here.” He dug around in his pocket. “My spare.”

He gave her a key. Staring at it in the palm of her hand, she tried to set the hammer down undetected.

“I see,” she said. “Come in.” 

He came in behind her. But after crossing the threshold of the doorway he made a small sound of surprise, turned around, and went out again mumbling about the cold. She watched him wallow through the garden. He picked up firewood from beneath the lean-to, bundling some under his arm. All around him the world was drenched, luminous, as though the rain had lathered up the stars and seeped them into everything. She saw the light atop the dew and remembered its promise to efface individuality. She was washed with calm. That’s right. 

She stood up straighter, as though the roots of the apple trees were shooting up through the floorboards, joining with her blood vessels. 

Gil returned and moved past her to the kitchen. He set the firewood in the wood stove. “I chopped this all for you, you know!” he said in a singsong voice. He set his bag on the kitchen table, took some twigs and scraps of paper from the tinderbox, and started up a fire.

As they sat at the kitchen table, she watched him grope around for the right words.

“Well, first, Anna, my condolences,” he said finally. 

His eyes crinkled in pain. He reached out his palm.

“It’s all right. I didn’t know him.”

“You didn’t?”

“Not really.” 

“You didn’t know him,” he said sadly.

He looked down at his hand, a gnarled, wrinkled thing that was resting on the table in front of him. He reached over to the stove and opened a damper. The embers were glowing against the dull green paint of the kitchen and deep inside the wood stove the growing flames, like firepriests, were exorcising the purple shadows. 

“I mean I hardly knew him,” she offered. 

Gil kept frowning. Strange to see a man mourn for and comprehend someone who was for her little more than a lucky absence. She avoided his eyes, looking down at the table. 

“What about the property?”

“Not too much.”

Gil shifted in his seat. “The most important thing to know is that it’s a permaculture orchard, in a sense,” he said. “The plot used to be much larger, in the ’70s, but the university bought up most of the land for the preserve. Joe bought what was left, kept the name, changed the rest. Permaculture is...you could think of it like its own private ecosystem, everything feeding back into itself. The bamboo, the animals, the garden. Of course, the apple trees themselves Joe had trouble fully integrating into the system. They’re finicky plants with a lot of pests. The trees still need irrigation, pruning, spraying, hands for the harvests. The honey locusts fix nitrogen, and there’s something about the berries between the rows…”

He stared up at the ceiling with his mouth half open, counting on two fingers, thinking.

“Really, I know more about the rest of it. I helped your grandfather out in the garden all the time. My wife and I live just over there, just west of you, we raise sheep. He was a good, friendly neighbor. It’s important to be friendly. You don’t look too friendly yourself, not with that scowl!”

His look of sadness had evaporated. He smiled at her, his teeth a bit crooked. 

“I’m kidding. You want to know what he thought of you, don’t you? I think it pained him how incompletely he knew you, like he was grasping at the facts of your life from afar. How long’s it been, twenty years? Twenty-five? He’d always tell Tamara and me the same story from when you were a little girl, so when you opened the door that’s almost who I expected to answer: a little girl. You came here on vacation when you were seven or eight, your dad had spent all afternoon chopping wood with Joe, he was exhausted, it was snowy and bleak and dark already, but you insisted on playing some kind of board game before everyone went to sleep...you lost and cried for hours. Your mother scolded you and said you would have to learn to lose. She wanted you to be graceful. But Joe thought a young lady ought to learn to want something fiercely enough to cry if she couldn’t get it. He was concerned your mother was raising a pushover. They argued about it all night after you went to bed. The next day they all found out you had an ear infection and that was probably why you had cried so much. You sucked all morning on a giant glassy icicle. Joe and his folk remedies! Anyway, from what I understand, you two eventually lost contact, as your mother withdrew, though Joe followed your art career as closely as he could with what information he could find or squeeze out of your mother. Though I suppose he stopped talking about all that a few years ago. Is that right?”

“It isn’t.”

They were frozen looking at each other across the table. The house creaked in the wind. They sat for a moment in silence while Anna suffered before this portrait of herself.

“I don’t want to hear about any of that.” 

The man across from her kept moving his lips around as though he were chewing on something. His words. He smiled with some bitterness. 

“Fair enough. I’ll have to work with an incomplete picture,” he said. “Before I forget, I brought you something.”

He picked up the plastic bag and opened it up for her: lettuce, kale, batteries for a flashlight, radishes with dirt on their bright red skin. Then he shared other details of the life he seemed to think she should live, starting with how to work the wood stove and how he liked to cook the radishes; she told him some details of the inheritance, such as how the dilapidation of some of the buildings had subtracted from the value of the property. Gil made a defeated gesture and said Joe had meant to reinforce the foundation on the packing shed and the greenhouse and the barn, but had never gotten around to it; anyway, it couldn’t be more than a few days’ work. She had received some money along with the property, but she would need to turn a profit on the harvest. Joe had always made a profit, Gil reassured her. Their conversation grew warmer. They turned back to permaculture. Ducks instead of chickens, Gil said: better for pest control, float in a flood. Campbells for eggs, East Indies for the iridescent feathers. Beauty matters, he said winking, and he seemed to want to say more but stopped himself. You regulate the soil with other plants instead of chemical fertilizers: in the garden, the alfalfa and white clover stabilized the clay. Perennials, everywhere, perennials. 

As she listened her heart stayed clenched in her throat. Here’s another person, she thought. While the day is escaping me. 

But she felt a bit guilty for that flash of callousness. She let him go on.

He took her outside. They toured the garden. Here’s the alfalfa, mutter, ginseng, clover, woad for dye, maybe for wool from some of our sheep? Another wink. In the sunlight he was jolly. Sweet-smelling lilies, sorrel, scallions, stinging nettle, mugwort, garlic, rhubarb, tall sunchokes whose strong roots walled the weeds. These regulate soil nutrients, those attract good pollinators, and even the structure of the garden serves its purpose: rainwater swirls down its random-looking pathways so that each plant receives its share, and rain that would otherwise drown the plants instead drained into a puddle where it was soaked up by a verdant patch of watercress.

“Think of the movement of the water like an Incan terrace,” he said at the watercress, playful, smiling again. 

She did so, imagining herself far above the garden as though peering down from Andean clouds, beholding the garden as one beholds a forest…all the information was beginning to overwhelm her. She felt impatient. Here and there some plants seemed crushed, and the wet earth that held them was slightly impressed. Others were still dead from winter. When would the weather warm up enough for the whole world of the orchard to reveal itself? She felt like forcing open those closed flowers…Oh, yes, there was a violence in her. 

Meanwhile Gil went on: swales, windbreaks, wind and sunlight. The partitioning of the farmstead into zones like the divisions of hell. In the barn he showed her how to feed the ducks, once a day, and don’t leave them outside at night again. 

“Why not?” 

“Raccoons and foxes. They’ll dig beneath the wire to get at them.”

She looked down at the birds.

“Are there a lot of wild animals around here?” 

“Plenty. Raccoons and foxes, as I said, plus coyotes, deer, black bears, owls and rabbits and possums...”

He was inspecting one of the water dispensers, rubbing off some dirt with his thumb. 

“Here’s an idea, my wife and I could give you manure in exchange for letting the sheep come up and eat the windfall and the locust pods,” he said. “Joe used to let us do that.” 

But she was busy thinking of the animal she was convinced she had killed. Now Gil was trying to unclog dirt from a hole in the dispenser with a twig, though she had the sense he was waiting very carefully for her response.

“Alright,” she said. 

“You can think about it.” 

“Have you ever killed an animal?” she asked. 

Now he stood up and gave her a look she could not decipher. 

“A few,” he said. “But that’s more my wife’s business.” 

“I might have killed an animal.” 

“When?”

“Driving up. I’m not sure, though.”

“Did you see a body?”

“No.”

He brushed the dirt from his palms and placed a soft hand on her shoulder.

“You would have known if you’d hit something, sweetie,” he said. 

They left the barn. Outside the sunshine blinded them.

He turned to her.

“But speaking of animals, Anna, you ought to know we’ve seen a few black bears this season. They’re skittish, shy, easy to scare off, but it wouldn’t hurt to be prepared… You ought to drop by my house this week.”

A bear. Though his expression had taken on gravity, his plain and friendly voice comforted her. And was he hiding some kind of smile? He removed his hand.

“Anyway, I think I left something in one of the sheds, maybe the greenhouse. Do you mind?”

“Sure.”

He went into the greenhouse and emerged three minutes later, shrugging at her from across the grass. He went to check the packing shed. She saw him linger at the tractor near its entrance. He ran his hand along the side of the machine as one might stroke an animal. She wondered if he was reminiscing, not searching, if he was saying goodbye to his friend’s things as another way of saying goodbye to his friend, those things which for him were full of meaning and memory, the objects of their friendship and shared labor. 

She frowned. She would have liked for the shovels to have been merely shovels. 

With a sudden vicious desire for seclusion, she became anxious for him to leave. By the time he began walking back to her, empty-handed and pensive, her smile had faded into a cold and neutral look. 

I’ve got to change the scale of my thinking, she thought dimly. The thought came from beyond her. I’ve got to think in years, decades. 

A mistake could ruin everything. The giant living beast. I should speak slowly, almost imperceptibly, the way a flower blooms unnoticed. 

“Find it?”

“No. I must have misremembered.”

“What was it?”

He was crossing the grass to get back to her and seemed not to hear. The contours of his thoughts appeared on his face as he approached. His eyes were trailing along the ground.

“I have to get back to the farm,” he said. “Remember to drop by.”

“Where again?”

“It’s right across your property.”

They walked west, past the wood fence and a few feet into the woods. There it was down the hill and through the trees: white circles of sheep on grass, large dogs, distant figures, humans and animals. He nodded at her. 

“Any afternoon this week,” he said. “Keep the wood burning at night or you’ll freeze.”

Then he went into the thicket, his heavy boots crushing the underbrush.

She watched him go. I should have asked him why he touched the tractor, she thought. I should have told him to back off. 

Instead, after drinking coffee, she walked to the end of the driveway and took down the sign that read Gadwall Orchard. For her the orchard would be nameless, general, platonic, perfect.

Get Hothouse Bloom here.