When Claire Vaye Watkins was busy picking up the most prestigious honors in short fiction for “Battleborn,” her debut collection of stories that ran the gamut of experiences in the Silver State, there was one recurring thought that helped keep her grounded.
“Every time I was at some sort of awards ceremony or meeting someone famous or something, I was, like, ‘I need to, like, spend some time in the Pahrump Walmart to counterbalance this.’”
“Battleborn” was released in 2012, and Watkins hasn’t stopped writing about the Mojave Desert she calls home.
It was the setting for her first novel, “Gold Fame Citrus,” a work of speculative fiction set in a dystopian desert. It was home to her second, the autofictional “I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness.” And she’s returned to the familiar terrain once again with “Yellow Pine,” which will be released July 21.
“Well, it’s my muse,” Watkins says of the Mojave. “My stories are kind of just, like, rising from it. It’s, like, the scale that makes me feel OK. I need a lot of space.”
Writing what she knows
Watkins was born in Bishop, California, in the northwestern Mojave. She grew up in Tecopa and in Pahrump across the Nevada border.
During the pandemic, she moved back to Tecopa after a decade away, having purchased a 5-acre jackrabbit homestead she named Nothingness Flats. From there, Watkins spent plenty of time observing, protesting and camping outside the roughly 3,000-acre Yellow Pine Solar Project, approximately 10 miles southeast of Pahrump. That’s where she found love, heartbreak and a community of like-minded environmentalists desperate to save the desert tortoise and yucca from development.
All of that also can be said of Rose of Sharon, the “Yellow Pine” protagonist whose life is upended by the unexpected return of a former lover. In Watkins’ prose, he’s “the man who’d once poured salt on the slug of her heart.”
“We’re kindreds, for sure,” she says of her creation.
‘The avoidable carnage’
On the surface, a solar farm should be a win for the environment. But for Watkins and others, Yellow Pine, which began delivering its energy to Silicon Valley in July 2023, isn’t the way to go about it.
“I definitely think that a transition off of fossil fuels has to happen. It’s a desperate situation,” Watkins says. “I don’t think that industrial, privately-owned energy production is a good faith effort towards that. I think it’s kind of just a smash-and-grab job.”
Instead, she’d prefer to see solar projects contained to cities. “I’m not willing to sacrifice public wilderness until we have exhausted all the other options.”
In a 2022 column in The Believer, Watkins wrote about “the avoidable carnage” caused by the project’s parent company, Florida-based NextEra Energy Resources.
“Yellow Pine is home to about 90,000 old-growth yuccas and, until recently, 139 adult desert tortoises,” she wrote. The adults were relocated across the highway from the land they knew, Watkins added, and about 30 were eaten by badgers. The juvenile and baby tortoises, she noted, “were effectively left to die.”
“I got to know it really well,” Watkins says now of the land around Yellow Pine. “I had this feeling that I wanted to know what was being lost. Really have a relationship with the yuccas.”
The fate of those desert tortoises broke her heart.
“A tortoise is such a beautiful creature,” she says. “It’s so ancient and slow and charismatic. They have such expressive faces.”
The destruction Watkins witnessed left her “overwhelmed by how upset, how sad and how angry I am.” Watkins channeled those emotions — as well as some of the laughter and bonding and personal growth she experienced out there — into “Yellow Pine.”
A lifetime of concern
Watkins doesn’t remember a time when she wasn’t concerned about the environment.
“It was always just a real presence in my family and my town and my culture,” she says.
She divides her time between Tecopa and Orange County, where she’s a professor at the University of California, Irvine. Watkins returned to the Mojave, in part, because she didn’t want to lose touch with “the music” of the area since that’s where she learned how to tell stories.
“In a way, it’s very spectacular and dramatic and aggressively beautiful,” she says. “But also, you have to pay close attention. It’s not all one color. It’s not empty. And it’s not dead. It’s very alive.”
Watkins rails against the notion that there’s nothing out there in the desert.
“Corporations and other moneyed interests love to exploit that notion, that instinct, that mistaken reflex that we might have and say, like, ‘Well, it’s empty, so we can bomb it.’ ‘It’s empty, so we can irradiate it,’” she explains. “It is a misconception that has been very cooperative with powerful interests, so they don’t mind that misperception and, in fact, profit handsomely from it.”
Watkins is working on a couple of book projects and continuing her defense of the desert by making a documentary about the Amargosa River.
“Yellow Pine is a little stop on the way,” she notes, “but we’re doing the whole watershed starting up near the Test Site and then going all the way through to Tecopa.”
She hasn’t heard from NextEra Energy, the corporation behind Yellow Pine, and doesn’t think she will.
“I don’t know that energy executives strike me as readers of literary fiction,” Watkins says with a laugh. “I might be stereotyping a little bit there. But I would be pleasantly surprised to hear from them.”
Contact Christopher Lawrence at [email protected] or 702-380-4567.
Claire Vaye Watkins will read from her third novel, “Yellow Pine,” during an event Oct. 9 at The Writer’s Block. She’s scheduled to be in conversation with local author Erin Singer, whose debut novel, the Las Vegas-based “Dangerland!,” was released this month.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source neon.reviewjournal.com ’
