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.

Appearances

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

Yeah.

I started surfing recently, so I'm like, I got a lot of surfing metaphors going on.

You really got to kind of try to stay in the pocket of not becoming isolated or too lonely or misanthropic, which is a risk for me, feeling like other people are bad, like a malevolent force that I want to avoid.

I don't like...

it when I get into that way of thinking.

Ideally, solitude helps me be with others, but I have to be able to retreat from them.

I also, you know, most of the peopling I do is in reading and in books.

And I have to remember that those aren't real people either, you know, as real as they can seem.

Yeah, that's a real hazard.

I mean, comparison, I think, especially for an artist, I think it's pretty much useless.

You know, I try not to do it at all.

I've had times in my life where I have kind of been on a, like,

comparison is like a drug i'm trying to kick because i'm me you know i'm me i really um for some reason for me it's zadie smith i want to be like why am i not doing what zadie smith is doing and it's like well you're claire babe you know zadie's gonna zadie and george saunders gonna george saunders and you just do claire you know that's enough i i feel i feel best when i can inhabit that and um let everybody else just do their own thing too

It's been great to talk with you.

Thank you so much.

Likewise, Terry.

Thanks for having me.

Bad breakup, so you came running over here?

Because I like to know these things in advance.

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