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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

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

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

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

And I was on a short walk, not very far from my car at all in a place.

I could have thrown a rock and hit someone's house probably.

I was really not out in the wilderness, but I got so disoriented.

Heat does something really wild to your brain, and I was kind of not sane and couldn't find the path back to my car, and everything starts to sort of look the same.

I got really disoriented and really panicked, and luckily it didn't last that long.

But yeah, I've been confronted with how quickly it can happen.

Yeah, it has.

I wasn't raised religiously or even very spiritually at all.

So I came to that on my own later in life.

I was given the gift of desperation, they say, and just needed help.

Like I had this, I came to this point in my life where I felt like I

I had kind of exhausted all the intellectual, secular, educated ways of living, and I needed something a lot, lot older.

And when I'm in the desert, I can feel...

a feeling of being a part of something bigger than me, which is how I think of the divine.

I can really appreciate that I'm a part of this

living land and I give it something and it gives me something, even just thinking about my breath.

And these dark times have driven me to Buddhism lately.

So I have that practice to kind of draw on and I've done yoga for a really, really long time.

So, but yeah, I think that that must be true everywhere, that there's a divine part of me in all of this.

But it becomes very, very clear for me out in the desert.

Showing 321–340 of 479 · page 17 of 24