In 2021, one of Claire Vaye Watkins’ friends told her about a protest at the site of a future solar array called Yellow Pine Solar Project.
The project, intended to further state and federal energy goals, was planned to take over an expanse of desert that hosts a massive ecosystem of desert tortoises, yucca plants and pollinator insects.
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Watkins, who received critical acclaim for her previous books, “Gold Fame Citrus” and “I Love You, but I’ve Chosen Darkness,” decided to make the journey to the site. After all, she had grown up in the area and had a great love for her desert home. On the faculty of UC Irvine, she splits her time between the Mojave Desert and Orange County.
“I am an environmentalist. I agree we need to immediately decarbonize the economy. I thought that solar in the Southwest was an obvious way to do that,” Watkins said. “But the distinction they were making between solar in the built environment versus concentrated, privately owned, industrial-scale solar on public land – that was very arresting to me.”
That tension directly inspired Watkins’ next book, “Yellow Pine,” out July 21 from Riverhead Books. Rose, an environmental activist and single mother, lives on a homestead in the Mojave Desert in a community of interesting characters. What they have in common is a deep love for their desert and a desire to protect it from destruction. When Miles, Rose’s old flame, returns wanting to give their relationship another go, Rose is eager to seize another chance at love and motherhood, amidst the hopelessness of climate grief – but that doesn’t prove easy.
In “Yellow Pine, ” Watkins contrasts environmental grief with personal joy, emphasizing community as the foundation of resilience. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Q. Tell me about Tecopa and also “Nothingness Flats,” Rose’s homestead, and what led you to that setting for “Yellow Pine.”
I grew up in Tecopa, California, and also one valley over in Pahrump, Nevada, the site of the actual Yellow Pine Solar Project. So partly on the California side, partly on the Nevada side.
Nothingness Flats is kind of a hybrid of two different desert houses that I’ve lived in. One was in the Morongo Basin, outside Twentynine Palms; the other one is my house in Tecopa. I was really interested in the Jackrabbit Homesteads throughout the Joshua Tree area and the wider Mojave Desert, and the history of the Small Tract Act.
When I was a child, the federal government was still detonating nuclear bombs at the Nevada Test Site. So I was very familiar with the feeling that it is an area that is expendable and exploitable. People see it as a wasteland, which enables a destructive impulse. If you drill down on these supposedly expendable patches of land, you find they’re connected to these other larger systems of violence and injustice.
Even when we’re trying to transition our energy sources, we’re doing it within a system that says it’s OK to sacrifice all this biodiversity. But isn’t the point of energy transition to preserve life on this planet?
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Q. Speaking of frustration with systems, Rose feels things very intensely. That’s unique in a time when many people might feel like they’ve become numb to injustices on a massive scale.
Yeah, Rose is very sensitive and perceptive. She can look at one thing for a really long time. She and I have that in common. Many fiction writers do – Flannery O’Connor called it a “certain grain of stupidity” in us. Rose can go deep down into a feeling like grief or rage, and then come out of it and go somewhere else, be in love, want to make love.
The feeling of being numb – I wanted to write against that experience. Rose can be self-righteous, and intense and obsessed, but it’s something important she can offer society in the face of environmental grief. She can keep an eye on this one patch of land, bear witness to what’s happening and try to tell people about it.
Q. Still, there’s also a lot of comedy in the book, even amid the sad subject matter.
I’m glad that was clear. My nightmare is that someone might only see one dimension in this book, you know? They might think, Wow, this book is just yelling at me the whole time, when that’s kind of a bit that I’m doing.
It’s my version of the yin and yang from Taoism – there’s light and dark in equal measure. The comedy is there to counterbalance the big and profound feelings of grief. I’m interested in paradoxes, because the more I pay attention to life, the more paradoxes I see in the world. Take us – we might have really lofty righteous ideals, like “stop using your cellphone,” but then we have to actually live in the world.
Q. Can you tell me about your teaching at UC Irvine? What do you hope students take away from your classes?
I mostly teach creative writing workshops to undergraduate and graduate students. I also teach a class called “Writing the American West.” It’s based on an idea from Wallace Stegner about being “placed” rather than “displaced.”
When we learn about how to write fiction, we are usually taught that there are three parts: plot, character and setting. Setting is sometimes ignored – a lot of fiction is set nowhere. That’s a real problem for me, especially when we are increasingly becoming disembodied and abstracted by technology.
I try to get students to get grounded in place, and write about where their characters are, and how that affects them. You can’t be too dogmatic as a creative writing teacher, though. You have to be open to whatever they bring you.
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Q. You list some books that inspired you in the afterword. What is one you’d recommend to readers interested in learning more about the ideas in the book?
I recommend “Extinction: A Radical History” by Ashley Dawson. It’s a short book that goes into the history of human extraction and the death of species, driven by the economics of capitalism. It’s a very bracing linkage of several ideas, and it’s easy to read, and I think very smart.