Novelist Claire Vaye Watkins on the beauty & brutality of the desert
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What is Claire Vaye Watkins’ new novel “Yellow Pine” about?
The midterms are coming, and that means the news cycle, which is already intense, is about to get more intense this fall. So this summer is a perfect time to make sure your news diet is calibrated. I'm Laila Fadil. On Up First, we unpack the three biggest stories every morning so you can stay informed and get on with your day in less than 15 minutes.
Follow or subscribe to Up First today wherever you get your podcasts. This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. Like the main character in her new novel, Claire V. Watkins lives in the Mojave Desert near Death Valley. Also like in the novel, the desert around her is being developed by an energy company for solar energy. Solar might sound like clean energy, great, but solar on this grand scale is wreaking havoc on the desert ecosystem. Like many frontier territories, the desert attracts misfits, loners, drifters, and as Watkins puts it, weirdos. In the new novel, each of those types is represented in a small community of people protesting the, quote, green energy gold rush. But really, what can they do? What power do they have to defeat a corporate project already underway?
Is protest futile, delusional, self-serving? There's a lot of questions this novel raises, like how could a mother decide to live in the desert when her ex-husband and child have moved across the country for a better job and better schools? How has Rose, the new novel's protagonist, been shaped by having had a mother, father, and stepfather who were each addicted to alcohol or drugs? Twelve-step programs have always been part of her life as a witness or participant. Watkins' new novel is titled Yellow Pine. That's also the name of the solar desert project in the book. Her previous novel, I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness, is her most autobiographical book and quotes from the memoir My Life with Charles Manson by her father, Paul Watkins.
The cover describes Paul Watkins as Manson's number two man. His role was procuring teenage girls, recruiting them to join the Manson family. Claire was six when her father died of cancer. In reviewing her new novel, former Washington Post book critic Ron Charles wrote, "...among the swelling collection of books confronting our imperiled planet, Claire V. Watkins' fiction remains defiantly alive. Her stories and novels are rooted in the American West, that awesome expanse of dunes and deserts that uninformed observers would call empty." Where life has adapted to the damning conditions of heat and drought, Watkins finds characters burned away to their elemental anxieties and desires. Clairvay Watkins, welcome to Fresh Air.
Thanks, Terri. Happy to be here.
Happy to have you. So it's too hot, I would imagine, to be in the desert during the summer. So where are you staying for the summer?
Yeah, it is too hot. I'm staying in Orange County. I split my time between there and the desert. I think this is the first summer of my life that I haven't spent significant time out in the Mojave. So, yeah, it's a bit sad.
Can you describe the part of the desert that you live in and what the environment is like?
Sure. I live in the eastern Mojave Desert about halfway between Las Vegas and Death Valley in a little town called Tacopa where I grew up. It's not for everybody. It's about 100 people. That will be the understatement of the interview. Yeah, it's for about 100 people. And it's really beautiful, just like staggeringly gorgeous landscape and scenery, huge, huge mountain ranges. There's a little river that goes through town, the Amargosa River. It's mostly underground, a subterranean river, but it surfaces in these hot springs. And there's just this like explosion of water. life around the river. What kind of life? Well, pretty much anything you can imagine. Birds, bats, insects. Each hot spring has a lot of endemic species, so living creatures that only live right there.
Each of them has a little pupfish. Most charismatically, probably desert tortoises and then less charming creatures like gigantic black biting horseflies. And It's a very alive, very biodiverse place.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is Claire Vaye Watkins’ new novel “Yellow Pine” about?
0:00–5:47
2
How does the desert landscape shape the lives of the characters and the author?
5:47–12:32
3
What are the environmental impacts of the large‑scale solar project in the Mojave?
12:32–19:34
4
How did Claire’s family become involved with the Charles Manson cult?
19:34–26:08
5
Why does the novel focus on protest and the limits of activism?
26:08–32:10
6
What does solitude mean to Claire and how does she balance it with loneliness?
32:10–38:10
7
How does raising a child far away influence the themes of sacrifice and parenthood in her work?
38:10–44:51
8
What spiritual or philosophical insights does Claire draw from living in the desert?
44:51–51:18
Speakers
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