The Mojave Desert is in Claire Vaye Watkins’s DNA. She was born in Bishop, four hours away from Tecopa, the town in Death Valley where her parents lived, which had no hospital, raised in Tecopa and across the state line in Pahrump, Nevada. Growing up in the Mojave, she told John Freeman for Alta’s California book club, your reality is “draining lakes and bombing places…making them toxic for effectively ever.”Article continues after advertisement
The Mojave looms over the stories in Battleborn, her first collection. Battleborn was launched in May 2012 in New York City at the home of her agent Nicole Aragi and then Granta editor John Freeman, at a desert-themed party co-sponsored by Riverhead Books, Granta, the Paris Review and One Story, featuring cacti, geodes, and custom cocktails named after the opening story, “Ghosts, Cowboys”: The Ghost, a smoking absinthe corpse-reviver variant involving dry ice, and The Cowboy, a tequila grapefruit drink.
The book put Watkins on the map, winning the Story Prize (I was one of the judges), the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, and garnered her a Guggenheim award and a spot on the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” fiction writers of 2012. I picked Battleborn as one of my top five story collections of the year at NPR.
