Novelist Claire Vaye Watkins on the beauty & brutality of the desert

This election season you can streamline your news intake with up first. Our team of reporters and editors works overnight so you can start every morning with three stories you need to know in short episodes, 12-14 minutes long, to save you time and your sanity. Follow up first on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is fresh air, I am Terry Gross. Like the main character in her new novel, Claire Vay 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 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 could 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?

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