“You don’t have to do much to be transgressive, and that’s a problem.”

An Interview with Claire Vaye Watkins

Claire Vaye Watkins spent her earliest years in Tecopa, California, a place in the Mojave Desert that has fewer than two hundred residents. Her parents owned a rock shop, which was one of the town’s only destinations. “Tecopa had a general store, a post office and a school… and that’s about it,” she told The New York Times in 2012. Twice each month, Watkins accompanied her mother to the grocery store—a forty mile trip, unless the pair drove eighty miles to Las Vegas instead.

“It’s pretty remote driving,” says Watkins. “There’s no interstate, just that iconic two-lane asphalt road through the desert.”

The stories in Battleborn, Watkins’ first book, are filled with cars—a Ford pick-up with a bed full of forgotten fireworks, a Dodge Neon that two high-school girls take to a rough night in Las Vegas, photos of a 1966 Chevy Chevelle left after a car accident. In “Virginia City,” a young woman named Iris drives two friends to a former Nevada boomtown, where they drink Bloody Marys, and explore a church hidden in the back of a casino. “There are plenty of good reasons to find yourself in Virginia City, but there’s only one reason,” writes Watkins. “We came to time-travel.”

Watkins does the same. The ten stories in Battleborn are populated with seekers, men and women that scrutinize their pasts to better set their present courses. Some misinterpret their markers or maps. “This happens every summer,” one story begins. “A tourist hikes into the desert outside Las Vegas without enough water and gets lost.” Some of her wanderers are lost—not forever, perhaps not for long, but briefly and consequentially. Battleborn honors the complexities of emotional terrain alongside the physical and historical, and Watkins diligently follows her characters along the courses they choose.

Battleborn received multiple prizes upon publication, among them the Story Prize, the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and a Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. Watkins is an assistant professor at Bucknell University and, at present, a visiting assistant professor of creative writing at Princeton University. She traveled to Missoula in October to read at the Montana Festival of the Books, during which this interview took place.

Over breakfast, Watkins spoke about the creation of Battleborn, her relationship with the American West, and the politics of transgression. However, we began our conversation along the two-lane asphalt road in Nevada, where country music on the car radio helped shape Watkins’ early notions of narrative.

—Brendan Fitzgerald

I. “When I was a teenager, my friendship hubs were the people who had cars.”

CLAIRE VAYE WATKINS: I...