WELCOME TO THE HVWC CALENDAR: home of all our upcoming readings, events and workshops. You can view by list or calendar (see right menu to choose). Click the colored tabs below to show only specific options. Our workshops run as multi-session series or one-day “intensives.” Note, we list the multi-session courses on the first day they meet only. The full dates of the session are described in the course descriptions. You would need to scroll back to the start date if you needed to enroll for something already underway. But do let us know if you want to join something in midstream since we need the blessing of the instructor. Questions? Email us.
Workshops – This category encompasses all one-day and multi-week classes, whether in person or via Zoom.
Readings – Our readings are in many different genres and take place in person, on Zoom, or both!
HVWC Recurring Events – This category encompasses such regular favorites as Open Mic, Open Write, and Submission Sunday.
Special Events – These other creative experiences are sure to interest our creative community!
Writing Psychology, Obsession, and Interiority with Austyn Wohlers (via Zoom)
February 4, 2025 @ 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
$335.00
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.
NB: This class will be taught on Zoom and will be capped at 15 students. Registrants will receive the Zoom link to the email address they use to register. It will arrive immediately after registration so please check your spam folder if you do not receive it. It will also be sent the day before class as a reminder. Please review the course policies page before registering for any classes. Please email ask @writerscenter.org with any questions.
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.