“I’m like a sadness doula,” said author Claire Vaye Watkins. In her novels, especially her latest, Yellow Pine, she trusts her readers to be able to sit with sadness and then move through it.
Rose, the main character, leaves Las Vegas during a personal crisis to live in the Mojave Desert, where an industrial solar project is being built. Watkins, who grew up there, describes the area vividly and with love.
She attended the University of Nevada, Reno, in the ’00s and now lives in lives in Pahrump Valley. She will be celebrating the release of Yellow Pine at The Radical Cat, 1500 S. Virginia St.—in conversation with UNR’s Christopher Coake, whom she calls her mentor—on Thursday, Aug. 27, at 6 p.m. Tickets are free and can be gotten from The Radical Cat.
You’ve said that UNR was where you first felt “placed” (as opposed to “displaced”). How did your time here give you that sense of being ‘“placed”?
I studied the humanities, and that helped me think deeper. Also, the history in Nevada is older up in the north, and it also de-familiarized my relationship with the Mojave Desert. It was the first time I went to another biome. The Sierras are so spectacular, (as are) the eastern deserts, too, going out to Pyramid Lake. I was sort of like, “Oh, where I have been is an important part of who I am.” I learned a lot about where I was, how people had gotten there, what had happened before, and the other people who had been there before. Reading Sarah Winnemucca closely and Mark Twain critically—enjoying his style—it helped familiarize me with an artistic tradition that I would like to contribute to.
What kind of backdrop does the desert make for Rose to process everything?
It feels removed from urban life, so it changes the tempo. Time is different in a super remote area, right? There are more rocks and plants and animals than people by many, many orders of magnitude. I think that adjusts one’s perspective. You can see the Milky Way there, so it’s a good reminder that you’re just a little speck, really.
It’s clarifying; there’s not a lot of distraction. She walks a lot, starts reading again—for pleasure—and talks to her neighbors, because there’s no cell service.
Despite the harsh environment of the Mojave, it is a place you return to in both your writing and in your life. What keeps bringing you back?
What I feel when I go there is recognized, a recognition between me and this particular valley where I have spent most of my time on this Earth. This is a little fraught for a white girl to be saying, I realize, but I really resonate with thinkers like Corbin Harney, who was the spiritual leader of the Western Shoshone Nation and part of the global peace movement that stopped the nuclear bombs at the (Nevada) Test Site. He talked about how you can know a place and be known by it, and feel part of it, like you are one and the same. I can access that notion—little glimmers of it, at least—when I’m out there. I want to share that experience with the reader.
It’s interesting because it’s partly about the sublime, but it’s not a big, overwhelming book. It’s pretty simple and pared down and easy to read.
You watched the real Yellow Pine solar project get built in real time. For people who picture solar as panels on a roof, what does industrial solar actually look like on the ground?
I watched this facility—it’s like (3,000) acres—called Yellow Pine, be built. It was built on an old growth forest where there were very intact, ancient plants. The environmental impact report—which the company pays for, so, if anything, would underestimate this cost—(noted that likely) half a million creosote bushes would be destroyed by the array, 92,000 yuccas and everything that lives in them. It was a really intact habitat. And tortoises, desert tortoises, 130-something, were dug up and “mitigated.” They were moved across the road, and a lot of them died. They were eaten by badgers, or they tried to go back, because it’s their home, and the place they know where their family is, and they died trying to go back. They scrape along the fence of the array until they die.
It’s avoidable, completely avoidable. … Industrialization of a wilderness is a profound sacrifice, way too much sacrifice, and we don’t have to do it. We’ll probably have to have some industrial solar if we want to get off oil, but not like that—not what happened at Yellow Pine. It’s such carnage, avoidable carnage.
Nevada is often treated as empty space ready for military use and giant corporate infrastructure. How does Yellow Pine push back on that idea?
Well, part of it is that it bears witness to how alive the place is, and eulogizes the actual site, Yellow Pine. Rose and I watched what happened there. We know that the story that it was empty or barren or lifeless is totally wrong. People know that, too. It’s just corporate power and our corrupt-ass government that is pretending to think that this is some wasteland.
The irony is, there is a lot of the American West that is wasted, has been wasted, because our government is an inept steward of these lands. So, you could put industrial solar there. … Agricultural fields that are wasted and military bases—there’s plenty of room and land already. Intact wilderness—we can’t spare an inch.
What is the best novel set in the desert that people may not have heard of, but should add to their reading lists?
Erin Singer’s novel, Dangerland!, which is just out, a brand new one, set in a busted housing development in Las Vegas and suburban shenanigans. It’s a really, really good, really clever, funny book about Vegas, which deserves more artful depictions.
Anything else?
I want to thank the people doing great work at Thacker Pass. Their group is called People of Red Mountain. They inspired Yellow Pine, and they also stood up against this senseless carnage.