<\/p>\n
W<\/span>hen Claire Vaye Watkins was busy picking up the most prestigious honors in short fiction for \u201cBattleborn,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n \u201cEvery time I was at some sort of awards ceremony or meeting someone famous or something, I was, like, \u2018I need to, like, spend some time in the Pahrump Walmart to counterbalance this.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBattleborn\u201d was released in 2012, and Watkins hasn\u2019t stopped writing about the Mojave Desert she calls home.<\/p>\n It was the setting for her first novel, \u201cGold Fame Citrus,\u201d a work of speculative fiction set in a dystopian desert. It was home to her second, the autofictional \u201cI Love You but I\u2019ve Chosen Darkness.\u201d And she\u2019s returned to the familiar terrain once again with \u201cYellow Pine,\u201d which will be released July 21.<\/p>\n \u201cWell, it\u2019s my muse,\u201d Watkins says of the Mojave. \u201cMy stories are kind of just, like, rising from it. It\u2019s, like, the scale that makes me feel OK. I need a lot of space.\u201d<\/p>\n Watkins was born in Bishop, California, in the northwestern Mojave. She grew up in Tecopa and in Pahrump across the Nevada border.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s where she found love, heartbreak and a community of like-minded environmentalists desperate to save the desert tortoise and yucca from development.<\/p>\n All of that also can be said of Rose of Sharon, the \u201cYellow Pine\u201d protagonist whose life is upended by the unexpected return of a former lover. In Watkins\u2019 prose, he\u2019s \u201cthe man who\u2019d once poured salt on the slug of her heart.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re kindreds, for sure,\u201d she says of her creation.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t the way to go about it.<\/p>\n \u201cI definitely think that a transition off of fossil fuels has to happen. It\u2019s a desperate situation,\u201d Watkins says. \u201cI don\u2019t think that industrial, privately-owned energy production is a good faith effort towards that. I think it\u2019s kind of just a smash-and-grab job.\u201d<\/p>\n Instead, she\u2019d prefer to see solar projects contained to cities. \u201cI\u2019m not willing to sacrifice public wilderness until we have exhausted all the other options.\u201d<\/p>\n In a 2022 column in The Believer, Watkins wrote about \u201cthe avoidable carnage\u201d caused by the project\u2019s parent company, Florida-based NextEra Energy Resources.<\/p>\n \u201cYellow Pine is home to about 90,000 old-growth yuccas and, until recently, 139 adult desert tortoises,\u201d 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, \u201cwere effectively left to die.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI got to know it really well,\u201d Watkins says now of the land around Yellow Pine. \u201cI had this feeling that I wanted to know what was being lost. Really have a relationship with the yuccas.\u201d<\/p>\n The fate of those desert tortoises broke her heart.<\/p>\n \u201cA tortoise is such a beautiful creature,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s so ancient and slow and charismatic. They have such expressive faces.\u201d<\/p>\n The destruction Watkins witnessed left her \u201coverwhelmed by how upset, how sad and how angry I am.\u201d Watkins channeled those emotions \u2014 as well as some of the laughter and bonding and personal growth she experienced out there \u2014 into \u201cYellow Pine.\u201d<\/p>\n Watkins doesn\u2019t remember a time when she wasn\u2019t concerned about the environment.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was always just a real presence in my family and my town and my culture,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n She divides her time between Tecopa and Orange County, where she\u2019s a professor at the University of California, Irvine. Watkins returned to the Mojave, in part, because she didn\u2019t want to lose touch with \u201cthe music\u201d of the area since that\u2019s where she learned how to tell stories.<\/p>\n \u201cIn a way, it\u2019s very spectacular and dramatic and aggressively beautiful,\u201d she says. \u201cBut also, you have to pay close attention. It\u2019s not all one color. It\u2019s not empty. And it\u2019s not dead. It\u2019s very alive.\u201d<\/p>\n Watkins rails against the notion that there\u2019s nothing out there in the desert.<\/p>\n \u201cCorporations and other moneyed interests love to exploit that notion, that instinct, that mistaken reflex that we might have and say, like, \u2018Well, it\u2019s empty, so we can bomb it.\u2019 \u2018It\u2019s empty, so we can irradiate it,\u2019\u201d she explains. \u201cIt is a misconception that has been very cooperative with powerful interests, so they don\u2019t mind that misperception and, in fact, profit handsomely from it.\u201d<\/p>\n Watkins is working on a couple of book projects and continuing her defense of the desert by making a documentary about the Amargosa River.<\/p>\n \u201cYellow Pine is a little stop on the way,\u201d she notes, \u201cbut we\u2019re doing the whole watershed starting up near the Test Site and then going all the way through to Tecopa.\u201d<\/p>\n She hasn\u2019t heard from NextEra Energy, the corporation behind Yellow Pine, and doesn\u2019t think she will.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t know that energy executives strike me as readers of literary fiction,\u201d Watkins says with a laugh. \u201cI might be stereotyping a little bit there. But I would be pleasantly surprised to hear from them.\u201d<\/p>\nWriting what she knows<\/h2>\n
\u2018The avoidable carnage\u2019<\/h2>\n
A lifetime of concern<\/h2>\n