Writing Psychology, Obsession, and Interiority with Austyn Wohlers (via Zoom)

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…