Claire V. Watkins

speaker

479 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 12 Sep

Claire V. Watkins’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

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Fresh Air · Novelist Claire Vaye Watkins on the beauty & brutality of the desert · 6 Aug 2026 podcast

When we hurt the land and the air and the water, we're hurting ourselves.

So yeah, he could have got it from a number of shenanigans, but at the end of the day, he only lived to be 40 years old.

Well, it's not that dissimilar from those tropes, you know.

I think to be a small, you know, barely upright hairless mammal walking around in that climate can be really scary.

And it does make you feel like, oh, I could die out here.

You know, it's not, we're really not that far away, you know, your air conditioning, your car overheats, you're on the side of the road and it's 120 degrees, there will be buzzards circling.

And I think there's something primal and immediate about that.

And I think I was exposed to it mostly because my mom ran this little museum and rock shop on the edge of Death Valley.

And a lot of tourists would come through, especially European tourists.

Maybe they had seen some of those Westerns that you had seen and wanted to have a Death Valley adventure.

And my mom used to say that it was her job to save the European body from the European imagination.

And I would listen to her and occasionally people would go...

go missing.

And I would listen to the dramas of someone not making it, which happens pretty regularly out there.

It's an extreme place.

Yeah, I have actually.

I got a pretty mild heat stroke once when I was in Joshua Tree of all places, the most, you know, gentrified part of the Mojave Desert.

Forgive me, Joshua Tree.

I love you.

But I just got really hot.

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