“And now the day was dawning and its psychedelic colors dyeing the fog: lilac, rose, tigerlily, marigold…she heard crows, the birds. Encouraged by the light, she sped up. She thought her vision was clearing. She felt a wash of hope bubble up inside her, excitement, light emerging and coloring her body like a prism. Where before it had felt dense and dark like iron.”
Hothouse Bloom
This is an escapism book about dirt and rotting apples. Without titillation, the reader watches someone try to escape, so earnestly. Framed not as a magician wriggling out of a straight jacket or an upbeat heist executed by scoundrels, but the slow devotion of digging a hole with a hand trowel.
Hothouse Bloom (2025), the debut novel written by Atlanta-born Austyn Wohlers and published by Spartanburg, South Carolina-based Hub City Press, follows Anna as she leaves her life as a city dweller and painter for a small apple orchard she inherited. From the beginning, Anna intends on a new pace. For her, the desire for a slower, more intentional, less reactive life demands that she not only learn how to farm, but that she do so in solitude. Further, she decides her new life dictates that she forgo painting entirely. However, Anna meets interlopers that intrude on her isolation: the neighbors, two dogs, and the experts she needs to help her actually keep the orchard going, along with her friend, Jan, who arrives to assist on the farm and complete his own creative project, a book.
The premise of running away from home, from yourself, from what you did and who you thought you were, is appealing. It is also familiar. A true puritanical, American story, Hothouse Bloom is in conversation with both Henry David Thoreau’s foundational text on self-reliance Walden (1854) and the survivalist television show Alone (2015-). It also finds some parallel with Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear (2026) about an influencer’s life homesteading, but perhaps tonally connects more with The Vaster Wilds (2023), Lauren Groff’s novel about a pre-American colonist living alone in the wilderness after being forced out of her English colony. Degrees of agency and the capacity to “opt out” alter each of these protagonists and their contexts, but they all hold high that self sufficiency is the solution to their circumscribed predicament.
The fact that Anna is an artist differentiates this story from the others. Occasionally, there is gossip that someone has “left the art world,” which is often done privately or without declaration, but becomes more notable when someone of great success stops making art. Ann Hamilton, Jeffrey Gibson, Cady Noland, and Sondra Perry, have all left the art world to become “civilians”, most returning to their art practice in some form, often with great triumph. Artists who no longer make work cite career pressure, family obligations, financial prospects, or overwhelming administrative tasks that come with being an artist in the current climate and economy. However, Wohlers’s Anna rejects not just the commerce of an art career, but the physical production and cultivation of a creative life.
Despite Anna’s determination to repress her artistic impulse and gesture, her attuned vision leaks out everywhere. Without paint itself, lush description still renders the artist’s painterliness. The rippling ground, the patient sunset, the messy birth of a lamb, the splattered violence of the chicken coop raid, are scenes composed for viewing. Color more than anything is squeezed onto the page, as if straight from the tube. Her obsession doesn’t abate, it transforms. No longer creating paintings, she brings fervor, expectation, and frustration to the generation of the farm itself.
Called a “millennial pastoral” on the book jacket, the narrative feels tightly wedged into contemporary life, contemporary wishes. Requesting tests of fortitude to be performed by the land, the elements rather than the complexity of collectivity, personal relationships, and fraught communication, is alluring as email coffers refill in real time. A desire for an out, a new way of living, away from screens and society is resonant, but like any good thought experiment fully played out, more questions than solutions grow in the extreme. Wohlers asks: Where can you go when you leave everything behind?
Burnaway is excited to kick off Open Book, our first editorial book club, with Hothouse Bloom by Austyn Wohlers, selected by Burnaway’s Editor and Artistic Director Courtney McClellan. Courtney will lead a virtual book club tonight on Zoom on Tuesday, September 15 from 7-8PM EST. Register for the virtual book club here.
Courtney will also lead an in-person book club at Larakin in Atlanta on Wednesday, September 23 from 6-8PM EST. Information about the in-person book club can be found here.
Held in-person and virtually, Open Book is a literary program for curious readers who are interested in engaging with stories touching on both art and our coverage region of the South and Caribbean. At a time marked by AI-generated content and declining reading habits, Open Book serves as a space for critical thinking, thoughtful discussion, and gathering. Through this program, we hope to continue fostering a community of engaged readers across our coverage region and beyond.
