Meet the Teaching Artist: Voices in my Head: Plotting and Suspense in Interior Narratives with Austyn Wohlers
by Writing Workshops Staff
A week ago
In the latest WritingWorkshops.com offering, acclaimed author and musician Austyn Wohlers invites you to step inside the thrilling, tense corridors of the mind in her six-week workshop, Voices in My Head: Plotting and Suspense in Interior Narratives. For writers intrigued by the psychological depths of fiction, where suspense thrives not in action but in the feverish turns of thought, this course is an invitation to master the art of intense interiority.
Austyn, whose debut novel Hothouse Bloom has already been hailed as a transformative work in contemporary fiction, brings a wealth of experience to the class. Known for her probing prose and celebrated publications in The Baffler, Guernica, and The Kenyon Review, she guides students through the labyrinth of character-driven storytelling. Drawing inspiration from literary giants like Clarice Lispector and Han Kang, Austyn’s class dismantles traditional plot structures, focusing instead on how isolation, obsession, and thought itself can drive a gripping narrative.
Through guided exercises and deep dives into select texts, participants will explore techniques to sustain suspense on the sentence level, crafting fictions that resonate with unsettling realism. With live sessions and an engaging online community, students will leave equipped to craft narratives that echo long after the page is turned.
Hi Austyn Wohlers, please introduce yourself to our audience.
I'm a writer and musician from Atlanta, currently living in New York. My first novel, Hothouse Bloom, is coming out with Hub City Press in August 2025.
What made you want to teach this specific class? Is it something you are focusing on in your own writing practice? Have you noticed a need to focus on this element of craft?
The articulation of interiority and psychological states has always been what most interests me about fiction as an art form. Language is our primary tool for communicating with and describing experience to one another, and psychological fiction puts that tool to use at its most creative and thoughtful. Exploring interiority is quite literally sharing in what it means to be human.
Give us a breakdown of how the course is going to go. What can the students expect? What is your favorite part about this class you've dreamed up?
Each week, we'll read from a writer grappling with interiority in a slightly different way, discuss elements of their form, and do some generative writing exercises along the lines of both that reading and some traditional element of fiction (character, plot, setting, etc.). Students will upload their exercises as well as longer pieces they're working on and give each other thoughtful critical feedback on each other's work.
What was your first literary crush?
I was one of those teenagers who couldn't stop reading Hesse.
What are you currently reading?
Brian by Jeremy Cooper.
How do you choose what you're working on? When do you know it is the next thing you want to write all the way to THE END?
One thing I like about being a novelist is that you only have to have one or two major ideas, and the rest -- subplots, chapters, scenes -- are derivations of that idea. I feel like I have one major narrative idea every three or four years, usually in some way parallel to major questions I am grappling with in my personal life, and a novel is born in the attempt to fully investigate those ideas.
Where do you find inspiration?
In a lot of other forms, to be honest -- film, visual art.
What is the best piece of writing wisdom you've received that you can pass along to our readers? How did it impact your work? Why has this advice stuck with you?
Longform fiction is mostly about endurance and stubbornness. It is such a marathon of an art form that you have to find a way to guard against
What is your favorite book to recommend on the craft of writing? Why this book?
It's a classic, but Francine Prose's book Reading as a Writer has never failed me.
Bonus question: What’s your teaching vibe?
Casual attitude, advanced conversations.
Learn more about Austyn's upcoming seminar, Voices in my Head: Plotting and Suspense in Interior Narratives 6-Week Workshop, and sign up now!
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.
