Austyn Wohlers: On Living in a Decaying World, the Necessity of Community, and Her Debut Novel ‘Hothouse Bloom’

Austyn Wohlers’s debut novel Hothouse Bloom (Hub City Press, 2025) starts with the dream of living life in solitude and communion from nature, away from the hustle, bustle, and performance of the modern world. Protagonist Anna inherits her late grandfather’s apple orchard and seeks to lose herself in an idealized agricultural life. We exist with Anna during her time at the orchard, watching as she confronts the reality of farming, of staying alive, and the inevitability of the company of others. Beneath the serene facade of life on the orchard, Anna must contend with her desire to lose herself, when she can do anything but. 

Told in lyrical prose, Wohlers’s debut asks readers to consider the push-and-pull of an artist’s life, how we perceive art and work, and what it means to seek out the opposite of community. Called a “millennial pastoral,” Hothouse Bloom reminds readers that imaginings and reality do not always coexist.

Sydney Bollinger: What inspired Hothouse Bloom? 

Austyn Wohlers: I am definitely a nature person. I’ve always been interested in images of the natural. I grew up in Atlanta, which is a funny city because it’s a city, definitely, but it also has the largest tree canopy of any city in the US. My mom had a huge garden. My grandma had a berry farm… In college, I got really into Clarice Lispector and novels of experimental interiority. I was interested in joining those two aesthetic interests. The novel isn’t based on my life, but an imagined tale. 

It was really carefully outlined. I had pretty much every chapter and scene mapped out because it was my first time writing a novel. I was twenty-two. I went through maybe ten drafts and finished it when I was twenty-five or twenty-six. It was so scene-by-scene outlined that I actually had to smooth it out and make it feel more natural over the drafts. 

SB: You have so much persistence and tenacity to go through ten drafts! 

AW: I was really stubborn. I had a professor in undergrad critique the short story Hothouse Bloom is based on and say I didn’t understand the basics of fiction. That totally destroyed me at the time because that’s what I wanted to do. I was like, “I’m gonna make this work.” 

I think it might have been smarter to try to write a different book, but I was like, “Fuck you. I’m gonna make it work.” It’s really fueled by spite, honestly. 

SB: Some of the best things in life are fueled by spite. 

AW: Definitely. I’m someone who’s very encouraged by negative feedback. When people tell me something’s good, I think I don’t have to do anything. But if something’s getting a lot of negative feedback, I get this I-have-to-prove-it kind of attitude. 

SB: One of the ideas that struck me while reading the novel was how the book explores a trendy millennial dream to live in quiet solitude and coexist with nature away from all the hang-ups and responsibility in modern life. Why do you think so many of us crave this kind of existence?

AW: I think that’s always been around. You can trace it back to the longer trend of rural imaginings in American literature. The Blithedale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne would be a great example. 

I think it’s strong in our generation because we’re living through a crisis. As the world becomes more chaotic and overwhelming, it feels like the whole social fabric of things is falling apart and so that idea of simplicity is really attractive. I think you could point to 2008 or to Robert Brenner’s “The Long Downturn.” We live in a time of diminishing expectations in a decaying world and I think that dream is a dream born out of desperation. “If only I could go raise goats in the mountains everything would be so easy and not so overwhelming and horrible like it is.” 

SB: In the novel, the main character, Anna, finds solace in a place like this. You write, “In a place belonging to me and me alone, so overabundant with life that it’s functionally nothing, happily indifferent to me except where it demands to be touched.” What does this say about Anna’s relationship to the world at large? 

AW: She craves eventlessness and freedom from ambition and freedom from responsibility, but also expectation and perception. When I wrote the novel, I was really concerned about my ability to self-actualize as the kind of person I wanted to be as a writer. I was constantly fearing my ability to do it. So, in a way, it was an exploration of potential failure. I can be something of a pessimist, so even the failed route, which for Anna, of course, is a very lucky and privileged route, has to end in disaster. There’s a warped and westernized Buddhist ideal of non-attachment that she clings to. 

SB: When Jan arrives, Anna is soon faced with the reality of owning an orchard which dispels the mythic dream she had for her experience. She attempts to work with Jan and others to make it profitable, shattering her transcendental dream of solitude and oneness with the earth. At one point, she muses that if Jan hadn’t arrived, she wouldn’t have lapsed and “the apples wouldn’t have been strangers.” How does Jan’s existence and place in the orchard ruin her dream of the pastoral and the innocence of her experience?

AW: I think it could have been anyone. She had trouble with Gil and Tamara [her neighbors] early on. Jan is a foil to Anna in that he lives a hedonistic nomadic life as opposed to the tortured, internally difficult, aesthetic one that Anna is living. Jan’s ease of being in the world as Anna perceives it highlights Anna’s difficulty. I’ve had friends who just seem happy and I felt that same jealousy. I think it gets at aspects of the book that are more about mental illness than anything, like transcendental isolation being a way of giving up and isolating oneself, which is ultimately impossible. There’s no freedom from interaction with others. That’s one of the points of the book, both economically and socially. 

SB: The novel has a natural progression from Anna’s dream to the reality of farming, which is that it

s very hard work and things don’t always go right. At some point, apples don’t exist to just be apples. They exist to be dollars so she can continue doing what she’s doing. Capitalism looms over the novel as a malignant force and it disturbs Anna’s dream. She’s increasingly stressed about money and this tarnishes her relationship with the plants, but I think it also hurts her mental well-being. She slowly unravels. Can you speak to how money devalues nature and/or devalues health?

AW: I think for me the question is not necessarily about money devaluing nature and beauty, but instead nature and beauty being turned into value based on the system we live in. The rural dream is this fantasy that comes up against the compulsion of necessity in a capitalist economic system to exploit labor and turn resources into profit. Ultimately a farm is a business and that’s what it is. We have this idea of owning an apple orchard, herding goats, or whatever your flavor of the dream is as someone from the city who hasn’t actually experienced these things and [thinks of it] as being this world removed from this life of capital, but it’s actually structured by [capital]. These rural communities exist to bring goods to their communities or communities in the city. 

One book I read while writing that really influenced me was Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City, which is about how these idealized rural images we have in our consciousness are only made possible because of the cities that they feed. 

SB: Anna is a painter. She arrives at the orchard and decides she’s not going to paint anymore and puts all of her painting materials away. When Jan comes, he insists that she paint, but she makes up excuses, so Jan claims that she doesn’t want to look failure in the eye and believes Anna is “full of shit” when she says she doesn’t care for ambition. What does this say about the relationship between ambition and art? What does failure look like for an artist?

AW: That’s a question I’ve really struggled with in the past year as someone having just gotten a book picked up, especially since even as a teenager I wanted a book picked up. I found the identity shift really destabilizing. I had a goal throughout my twenties of getting a book picked up. Now do I just keep writing them? Now I’m somebody who writes books. I almost felt a loss of purpose. 

That was the end of a crisis of my twenties I alluded to earlier where I was just so paranoid about my ability to self-actualize as an artist and to ontologically become the person I wanted to be. I don’t really have that same concern anymore, and it even strikes me as a bit frivolous now, and that is what Jan critiques in his interior monologue later in the novel. 

I don’t know that Anna is someone who, like the artists I know and artists in my life, is compelled to make art. My friend has this psychoanalytic book about art being a sickness of needing to exteriorize the internal. Anna doesn’t have that sort of individual output so much as a desire to completely sublimate and erase herself, which I think we can do in art. I think that’s actually one of the more noble ways to pursue it, that the process of losing herself in the work ties into her idea of being when she’s at the orchard. It also ties into what she describes as her motivations for painting, which are about losing herself in these giant canvases that de-real the natural. I think she’s right when she says to Jan that she never really had ambitions to be an artist so much as to lose herself. But Jan is also right in reading that some of that is a cope for failure. In exploring what failure might look like as an artist, Anna has a very lucky route, but it still doesn’t make her happy because what she wants is an escape, which is impossible. That’s the tragedy of the book. 

SB: Anna’s relationship to painting mirrors her relationship to the orchard. She craves simplicity, gentleness, and losing herself in the experience of the canvas and the experience of being in the orchard, but there is this other, darker part that unsettles her. She chased something new in the orchard only to find herself in the same pattern. Why do we as humans, writers, and artists continue to do this? 

AW: I’ve been doing a lot of therapy recently and I think if you don’t address these problems and try to bury them into your subconscious, we are just doomed to [repeat them]. I don’t know what healing would look like for Anna because I just see her as this symbol of utter failure and defeat. I certainly don’t think isolating herself from her community and dropping her life and self-isolating was the way to heal. She has a tendency to close off. Some people live their whole lives that way. It’s the default way to live unless you try to change it. 

SB: Anna grows sicker throughout the book. I loved how this was done because I didn’t realize how sick she was until she becomes physically ill at the end of the novel. 

Jan starts to point this out, but for the majority of the book we’re in Anna’s head and experience her thoughts, so from her point of view, she doesn’t think anything is wrong. She believes she is fine and what really is working against is the machinations of running the orchard. Why is her perception of her health and Jan’s perception of her health so different? And why can’t she figure out something is wrong? 

AW: I can speak on this from personal experience. When you’re having a major breakdown or mental health crisis, you can become convinced that the problems in your life are completely insurmountable. I recently read A Fortunate Man by John Berger, which is the story of a country doctor. One of the beautiful points it makes, specifically in terms of mental health, is what a diagnosis can do. A diagnosis can bring you into the human family and show you you’re not alone. Anna is completely individualistic. She thinks of herself as alone in this world she’s trying to create and her isolation tendencies are really damaging to her psychically. She has a breakdown and shuts off everything in her life. We never even learn anything about what her life used to be like. 

She’s mentally ill the whole book and it becomes more apparent as other perspectives are introduced into the novel. I think of it less as a progression than as something revealed. I’m really attracted to depictions of mental illness in literature. I finished the edits for this book in a psych ward with a paperback copy. The book definitely, in a way, mirrors my own struggles with mental health. I think Anna’s tendencies were an exploration of the worst parts of myself. Living in community heals us, and I think Anna does everything wrong at every turn. 

SB: Anna seeks out this land as a place where she can find solace and peace while dealing with mental illness, but it is a space of isolation. Still, there are a lot of folks who believe living off the land can heal us in some way. But what does this look like if Anna continually makes the wrong decisions? How can we reframe our perspective on what this means? 

AW: I think this comes back to the question of community and Anna’s ability to accept help from her neighbors and accept help from Jan. To go back to John Berger’s book, one of the quotes in it says, so long as there’s other men who have experienced what we’ve experienced, there’s the possibility of hope. Whether that’s living off the land or living in more urban settings, that’s really the key, because it’s all we have. 

*

Austyn Wohlers was born in Atlanta in 1996. Her other 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. Hothouse Bloom is her first book.