Best Of: Life in the Mojave Desert / Director of ‘The Uprising’

Tonya Mosley (0:01)

From WHOY in Philadelphia, this is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tonya Mosley in Los Angeles. Today, two storytellers take on tales of resistance and rebellion. Author Claire Vaye Watkins lives in the Mojave Desert, just like the protagonist in her new novel, in an area being developed by an energy company wreaking havoc on the environment. The locals protest, but the novel explores whether they actually have power to defeat a corporate project already underway. Director Paul Greengrass' new film, The Uprising, examines what happens when people reach their breaking point. It takes us to 1381, when the peasants of England revolted against the king. Greengrass first noticed the parallels to today during the pandemic. Also, film critic Justin Chang reviews the new drama, Filipiniana.

That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend.

This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tonya Mosley. Terry has our first interview.

Terry Gross (1:06)

Like the main character in her new novel, Claire Vaye 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 may 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 can 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 Vaye 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.

Claire Vaye Watkins, welcome to Fresh Air.

Claire Vaye Watkins (3:25)

Thanks, Terry. Happy to be here.

Terry Gross (3:26)

Happy to have you. Can you describe the part of the desert that you live in and what the environment is like?

Claire Vaye Watkins (3:35)

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.

Terry Gross (3:50)

That will be the understatement of the interview. Yeah.

Claire Vaye Watkins (3:54)

It's for about 100 people.

It's really beautiful. It's just like staggeringly gorgeous landscape and scenery. Huge, huge mountain ranges. There's a little river that goes through the 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 life around the river.

Terry Gross (4:24)

So where you described, it's also around where you grew up. And it's also where the main character of your new novel lives.

So now I want you to describe how it's being developed.

Claire Vaye Watkins (4:35)

Yes. So the vast majority of land in this part of the country is public land. So it's owned by, in theory, all of us, but it's administered by the federal government. And it has been sort of in the crosshairs, I would say, of what boosters like to call the green energy gold rush. So it's extremely sunny. It's a good place for solar development, in theory, for that reason.

It's also kind of being besieged by other types of energy development like geothermal and mining. I mean, mining has been happening out there for a really long time, although the scale is getting bigger and bigger. The aquifer has been pretty dramatically depleted. And there's not a lot of water in this area to begin with in the best of times. So the natural resources are really being pushed to the brink in a pretty dramatic way. And there's been a long, long history of environmental injustice.