Begins Tuesday, March 18th, 2025

This class will have an online classroom in Wet Ink, with two live Zoom sessions at 8PM EST in Week 1 & 6. 

Any questions about this class? Use the Chat Button (lower left) to talk with us.

Austyn Wohlers is a writer from Atlanta, currently living in New York. Her first novel Hothouse Bloom, called “the kind of debut that resets the bar for the field at large” by Blake Butler, is forthcoming from Hub City Press on August 26th, 2025. Her fiction, poetry, translation, and criticism have appeared in The Baffler, Guernica, The Massachusetts Review, The Kenyon Review, The Cincinnati Review, Asymptote, Joyland, and elsewhere. In Baltimore, she ran the Near Future reading series. She is also a musician, playing with the psychedelic pop band Tomato Flower, with which she has toured supporting Animal Collective and Melt-Banana, and making drone music under her name.

Learn more about Austyn in our Meet the Teaching Artist series.

A six-week intensive workshop on maintaining suspense, interest and momentum in solitary, interior narratives taking place largely or wholly inside of a protagonist's mind.

Traditionally, the meat of fiction has us following characters as they move and act in the world around them in pursuit of their desires; their thoughts and feelings emerge shyly on the page as we see them react to the world around them. Recently, however, two writers whose work inverts these forms have emerged as favorites in the literary world: Clarice Lispector, whose lush, dark, and diamond-cut interior fictions describe interiority and alienation with the precision of a landscape painter, and Han Kang, whose poetic novels of femininity and alienation have recently won her the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Lispector and Kang’s work go against how many of us have learned to write stories: rather than taking agency in their own narrative, so many of their protagonists seem to shrink from the world, and space on the page is dedicated not to exerting their will upon the world but exploring how they think, feel, react and despair. How is interest and suspense maintained over narratives that take place largely in their protagonists’ mind? How is the fever pitch of obsessive narration maintained over the course of a novel? What makes a dark, psychological character study a compelling narrative? What makes this kind of prose compulsively readable?

In this class, we will practice writing fiction of intense interiority, studying the works of Lispector and Kang alongside others such as Kavan, Bernhard, Ferrante, Haushofer, Quin, and Hilst. We will dissect these fictions on the basis of their styles, plots, characters, and voices to break down how they are able to thwart the traditional rules of plot to create page-turning, obsessive interior narratives.

Course text selections from stories and novels by Clarice Lispector, Han Kang, Elena Ferrante, Thomas Bernhard, Marlen Haushofer, Henri Bosco, Hilda Hilst, Nicholson Baker, and Anna Kavan.

Note: This class will have an online classroom in Wet Ink, with two live Zoom sessions in Week 1 and Week 6.

COURSE OUTLINE:

• Week 1: Plotting Interiority
• Week 2: Imbuing Suspense in Thought and Setting
• Week 3: Character, Unreliability, and Free Indirect Discourse
• Week 4: The Fervent Monologue
• Week 5: The Obsessive Voice
• Week 6: Ruminative Fictions

COURSE TAKEAWAYS:

• Learn to imbue interest and suspense on the sentence level in fiction.

ONLINE COURSE STRUCTURE:

Note: This class will have an online classroom in Wet Ink, with two live Zoom sessions at 8PM EST in Week 1 and 6.

PAYMENT OPTIONS:

Tuition is $395 USD. You can pay for the course in full or use Shop Pay or Affirm to pay over time with equal Monthly Payments. Both options are available at checkout.

• Instructor: Austyn Wohlers
• Class starts on Tuesday, March 18th, 2025
• Note: This class will have an online classroom in Wet Ink, with two live Zoom sessions at 8PM EST in Week 1 and Week 6.
  
• Tuition is $395 USD

Contact us HERE if you have any questions about this class.