Blaise Zerega: Hello, everyone and welcome to Alta Journal's California Book Club. It's a thrill to be here this evening for Claire Vaye Watkins and her celebrated novel Gold Fame Citrus, along with the award-winning writer, Karen Russell, our special guest, and of course, your host, John Freeman. My name is Blaise Zerega. I'm Alta Journal's editorial director, and we've got a big crowd tonight. So I encourage everyone to reach out in the chat down below and say where they're zooming in from.
I'm joining tonight from San Francisco, and while you're doing that I'd like to go over just a little bit of housekeeping, please. Tonight's event is part of Alta Journal's California Book Club. It's our free monthly gathering, celebrating books that form a definitive guide to understanding life in the Golden State. In the weeks leading up to each club's meeting. Altaonline.com publishes numerous articles, excerpts, interviews, essays about that month's pick.
If you haven't had a chance to read them, I'd love to invite you. Please make sure you go and do that. Check out the fantastic essay by host John Freeman, editors Anita Felicelli and David Ulin, and I'd especially recommend the essay. "Why I Write" by Claire Vaye Watkins. It's just fantastic. And once again we've created a special booktail. It's a cocktail called appropriately Gold Fame Citrus. It's got vodka and watermelon, and and so on. You'll understand why, when you look at the recipe, and that's also on Altaonline.com.
All the articles are included in the California Book Club newsletter, which is also free to sign up for. So if you haven't done so, please do do that. Visit our site and click newsletters. And also every California Book club episode is recorded and posted on our site.
So you can go back and check out previous episodes. This club would not be possible without the amazing support from our partners. The Los Angeles Public Library, San Francisco Public Library, the Huntington USC Institute on California in the West, some great Indie bookstores: Book Passage, Book Soup, Camino Books, Vroman's, Books Inc. Green Apple Books, and Bookshop West Portal, as well as our partners, Narrative Magazine, and Zyzzyva. So please support our partners. Please support our authors, buy their books—already have a copy of Gold Fame Citrus? Pick up one for a friend, or purchase title by Karen Russell, and you too, can support the work we do at Alta by becoming a member by visiting Alta online.com. We've also got a special offer tonight for the California book club members for a limited time. You can enjoy 25% discount on our all access subscription. Get award-winning stories, add free digital access and a free altitude cartoon collection for just 37, 50 a year. There's a link in the chat and click on that to claim the offer or become a digital member for just $3 a month.
You visit our site, and again, easy to sign up, or even better, if you'd like, pick up the current issue of our magazine. It's $15, free shipping. No tax, you'll get it very fast. In it is that amazing essay by Claire Vaye Watkins that I referenced, as well as our cover package, 25 Books That Define California. It's all there on Altaonline.com. Welcome to tonight's program. And without further ado, please let me turn this over to the host of tonight's California Book Club gathering, my dear friend, the brilliant John Freeman.
John Freeman: Thank you, Blaise. Nice to see everybody. It's especially nice to be here today, because I've known Karen Russell and Claire Vaye Watkins for nearly 20 years each, and it's a special treat to have them here on the book club. One of the reasons why we put the book club together was to recenter discussions of literature with the best books by and from California, and books that thought about what it meant to be from this particular colonized landscape. What's here? What ecosystems are here, what people live here and call at home, what people have been ejected, and all of those things have factored into the work of Claire Vaye Watkins over the last 15 or so years since, she debuted in around 2010 with this extraordinary book of short stories, Battleborn, and one of the things that I think Claire has been doing over the years in 3 books all set in the desert where she grew up in Mojave.
This is her second book. Gold Fame Citrus is to think about landscape and memory, who gets to call home a place, what it means to grow up in the desert, and she herself was born in Bishop, California, grew up in the Mojave and Tacopa, where she now lives part of the time also moved in to Nevada, got a BA from the University of Nevada, and an MFA at Ohio State, which is where I met her 16, 17 years ago. Like most Western people, she greeted me and brought me a burrito, and we have been fast friends ever since, and I've watched with jaw-dropping awe the expansion of her talent into the areas of her interest and that mysterious interaction between what she always knew, growing up from where she was from and what she is able to write about as her talent reaches back into the past and retrieves those sense memories a sense of place and gold fame. Citrus is a book that benefits hugely from that collision. You could call it a cli-fi novel, but I think it's a novel that's kind of an anti-cli-fi novel or a novel, at least about those stories. It's set in the near future. There's been a drought and other things in Central and Northern California.
We're in L.A., where a woman, a man, and a child are holed up in the Hollywood Hills in the abandoned mansion of a Hollywood starlet, and who decide they gotta get out of town because things are getting a bit hairy. So they get into an antique Karmann Ghia and hit the road, driving into the center of what is now an expand very much large, very much expanded Mojave, where there is apparently a community that kind of sets us up. Please join me in welcoming the person who invented this, who created it, and who has given us so much already in 3 books, Claire Vaye Watkins.
Claire Vaye Watkins: Hi! That was overwhelmingly kind. Thank you.
Freeman: It's really nice to to be talking about this book, and I just wanted to start in at the deep end about landscape and memory, and what you might have been thinking about when you began to assemble this book and what you wanted it to address, because it's it's a very phantasmagorical book that blends together the figures, the stories of early explorers, if you would call them, of the West, while people in a kind of drastic scenario are exploring inward into a collapsed civilization if you will, but it feels like those 2 themes are right at the core of the book.
Watkins: Yeah, yeah, totally. I mean, I think the really like the animating myth of it. First is like what happened in the Owens Valley. The construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct system, and then draining that whole valley and most spectacularly in Owens Lake. And so, like, yeah, like you said, I was born in the Owens Valley, in Bishop, and that's because, like where I lived in Tacopa, there's no hospitals. It was like 4 hours across Death valley.
So there's already this kind of like epic migration in the story of my birth, of like driving from Tacopa through Death Valley to the Owens Valley, and then the story that is like really spectacularly drawn in Cadillac Desert, you know of, like how that lake was drained. That was like. I don't remember a time when I didn't know that story. My mom told it all the time. Everybody I knew would like talk about it from the perspective of the people who were like living in a well, they would like fear that their home was like toxic, you know. And then the other context. So there's like the Owens Valley. I can kind of like, see the map of it, the Owens Valley, and then the other site is the Nevada test site, and you know the the United States Government detonating a thousand nuclear bombs there until 1992, when I was in second grade. So yeah, the town where I grew up is near there. So yeah, like, I don't. I guess it's all saying like, I don't know how to be surreal once that kind of thing has happened in your home. There's no like gold fame, citrus.
It's weird. I haven't looked at this book in forever. But looking at it, I'm like this is really cranked up to 11, but it's also impossible to overdo it once. That's your reality, you know, draining lakes and bombing places, for you know, making them toxic for effectively, ever.
Freeman: You don't necessarily always get to choose your characters. But Luz, who's an ex-model, is one of the main characters as well as Ray, who's a ex-soldier who's been kind of his AWOL, and they make a kind of typical band of family by picking up a two-year-old who's been abandoned by people who look like they're from Point Break, and they notice this child wandering around and they take her with them.
Did you have any, any active decision in saying, like, you know, what an ex-model, who grew up as a kind of poster child for water conservation, you know.
Watkins: Yeah, I think I had read in Cadillac Desert that there was such a poster child for the Los Angeles Aqueduct Project, and I just have the kind of brain that like reads something like that in a history book. And it's like, what does that girl do when she grows up and wants to. Maybe like, have a mom, I mean, be a mom, you know, or having a career, you know. So yeah, it was kind of like that figure, and then this is sort of silly to admit. But why not like I?
For Battleborn, I had had my photo taken for Vogue magazine, and it was such a weird experience that, as I was doing it, you know, like standing very still. And really it was like physically so painful to stand the way they wanted me to stand and to have my feet and the shoes and stuff I was like, who does this all day for their work, you know, starting at so modeling and like becoming a human living symbol like throbbing. That was part of it. And then also, I think, because my dad died when I was really young like, for in my family system I could feel that I was like throbbing with all this like history and memory, but like I didn't really know him. He died when I was 6, so I mean I knew him, but I don't remember a lot about him, so I guess those are like the layers that came into Luz.
Freeman: When we met. You were in your MFA Program at Ohio State, and we started working together pretty quickly because your professor, Chris Koch introduced us, and he said that you had an interesting family background which you've since written about, that your father was a member of the Manson family, and he left before the murders, but he died before you were really fully conscious as a child. And so a lot of your interactions that you have as memories are actually you watching television clips of him.
And but you also have this incredibly close relationship with other members of your family which you've also written about, and Gold Fame Citrus oscillates between those kind of polarities which I think sometimes we live in now in 2025, where people are memes within our own life. And then you also have relationships with those same people or different relationships. And I wonder how you conceived of the the blend of intimacy that's in the book, because there is this flattening effect in some cases. And then there's this unexpected kind of zooming intimacy that is often not inappropriate. But it's unexpected. It's unexpected that Luz says, Hey, this child needs help. I'm going to take her. And then, later, when Luz is kind of rescued by a woman in the desert, suddenly she finds herself telling her whole story to this stranger. Essentially, what is that balance of intimacy and projection for a novel? And do you find it's realistic to life?
Watkins: Hmm, yeah, I mean, it's really it's like, I knew this would happen talking to you because you're just like the the reader of all readers, and you have been like for me from the beginning, you know, like no one gets my stuff like you, I don't think. And and I also have been like in times of real drought, creatively. I've been like, I'll just send John a little smidge of language, and then, like that becomes a novel in 5 years or something, you know. So anyway, all to say, I didn't know that was happening at all. I didn't know that. That is how intimacy works in that in this book. But you're totally right. It is weird and like intense and and kind of inappropriate or very confusing all the time, like Dallas, like becoming kind of like a wet nurse for Ig, you know, or I don't know a million examples of warped, twisted intimacy that's kind of like I don't know something to do with how like the story of intimacy in the popular culture is so like flat and inadequate. And maybe that's something that I see looking back at, like the Manson family phenomenon which I have yeah, really gotten to know my dad through that media, you know, clips, and also books like, sensational kind of true crime-y books. His book, other, like more interesting, takes on it.
And now that is so common like we. We, a lot of us, know each other that only in that way, in that mediated way, even if we're still alive, you know. Still on this plane for me, that was just like something I did because he was not in his body anymore, right anyway. So gosh! Not to get too like union about it, or whatever. But it's probably all that stuff, you know.
Freeman: Well, you're talking a little bit about. I mean, you're talking more than a little bit about the type of masculinity that is often associated with prophets and the sexual kleptocracies that are often baked into some of those roles, and I don't want to give anything away from the later part of the book, but you know they do go into the desert. Some bad things happen. They wind up finding a community, not what they expected, and there is a kind of 21st century version of all the the explorers from before.
And I thought, Wow, this is so exciting. Watching Claire wrestle with this, this legacy of like, of of exploration being also a form of of twisted intimacy both with the landscape and with the people that become followers. And and so to go back to the beginning of the book. There's there are all these wonderful passages really early on where they're like living in the Hollywood Hills. Ray is building a skate ramp which, like made my heart sing. It's like I would I would do that at the end of the world. Why not? And they have great sex together like unexpectedly. It's not porno. It's just real. It just feels real. And it totally contrasts with other things that happen in the later part of the book and memories that come back to laws. And I think over time you've become this amazing writer of bodily intimacy of, you know, characters with their own bodies. You know, families with each other of the intimacy of poverty of sexual intimacy. And I wonder if you could talk about that as like. You always think, okay, it's the end of the world. Do they really have time to fuck, you know. But in, of course, in the Claire Vaye Watkins book they do. They're like, why not? Can you talk a little bit about why, that's important to you, and why it feels important to this story.
Watkins: Yeah, well, I think well, it just has to do with like, I want to have the texture of the whole experience. And I have only have this instrument that I can feel the texture with, you know. And that's what I use for them, too. Like being, like Wallace Stegner, I teach this class called Writing the American West at UC Irvine, and we use this moment from Wallace Stegner. He talks about being a placed rather than a displaced person in this essay called A Migrant Childhood, which is all about moving a lot, and I did move a lot like around a little small town because we were really poor. So you know, and then later, a lot of like evictions and housing foreclosures and stuff, anyway, so like rerouting or recentering, like you said in the introduction, and like being in the body and being where your feet are planted, is, I think, a counterbalance to that chaos.
And it's also kind of like the spiritual part of the, spiritual efforts of the books I can see now, like I wasn't aware that I was trying to do that, but like sex, and you know, is like one of them. Anyway, people are always like trying to commune and like, come together and be close and like they have to go long distances and their need to have, like some kind of like internal magnet like I'm I think there's some line in there about how Luz's blood is like pulling her towards the dune sea, like the iron in her blood is maybe like magnetized. This is like, obviously, I was like just discovering Faulkner when I wrote this book. It's sort of bonkers sometimes. But you you like. What are the other forces that you don't see that can bring us together. And then what does it feel like, to be together? And how beautiful, but overwhelming and confusing and sometimes dangerous and upsetting it could be. I don't know. It just seems like an way that I can. I don't know how to write a character unless I know where they are, you know, and then it's that's a becomes a very sensate experience, like, well, what time of year is it? Is it safe to be outside or not? You know. And I don't know. Probably just like a little little juvenile impulse about being like horny or counter. I find I don't know America. Our cultures be so prudish, and I grew up like, you know, prostitution is legal in my town, and my grandma was a change girl at Caesar's Palace, and she had fled like a very repressive Christian, abusive household. A lot of religious trauma coming at all the generations before me, and they went to southern Nevada or to the desert to the Mojave Desert, to be like away from all of that repressive shit, you know whether it's like a back to the land hippie kind of way with my dad or my mom was a real like Thoreau in, too, you know, like she was like I got to get out of Las Vegas because my soul is dying.
And then I kind of just like came in to that. So the idea that you are where you are because of where you are that seems obvious to me but weird.
Freeman: Well, it shows up in the writing, which is one of the things I love. The most about your books is just the control, and the power and the horny funniness of your prose, and I never know where it's going. It talks to me immediately. It sort of says that thing which I love when books do, which is like, Hey, you're here for a good time. I'm going to start with a joke or something that's about to get towards a joke. Do you want to? Just maybe read a little bit from the beginning of the book? So people who haven't started it yet can can hear what it sounds like.
Watkins: Yeah, I'd love to. Okay. I'm just gonna read the very start at the beginning of the book one, the part first part has a epigraph from William Mulholland, who he was like the guy who made the Los Angeles aqueduct. It says, there it is, take it, hunting the prairie dog into the library was a mistake. Luz Dunn knew that now, but it had been a long time since she'd seen a little live thing, and the beast had startled her.
She'd woke near noon, having dreamed a grand plan and intending to enact it, she would try on every dress in the house. They hung like plumage in the master closet in every luscious color, each one unspeakably expensive. Imagine the ones the starlet had taken with her
zIn the dream. Lu had worn every dress. All at once, her breasts bestudded with rhinestones and drenched in silver dust, her ass embroidered with coppery alleyways of sequins, pleated plumes of satin fanning from her hips, pale confectioner's tulle floating like spun sugar at her feet.
Of course things went one at a time in the lifeless, waking world. It was important to have a project, Ray said. No matter how frivolous. The Santa Anas winged through the canyon now bearing their invisible crazy making particulate. And Ray said she should try to keep her hands busy. She should try not to sleep so much. Some of Ray's projects included, digging out the shitting hole and siphoning gasoline from the luxury cars abandoned throughout the canyon
Yesterday, Luz's project had been to present Ray with a gift of herself, swaddled like a chocolate in a fur coat she'd excavated from one of the cavernous hall closets. Though she was not so dark as chocolate.
She'd roasted under the mink, her upper lip already jeweled over and trembling with sweat when she breached the back yard where Ray was working into the ever beaming, ever heating, ever evaporating sun of sun, drought, of droughts.
These were their days now Luz and Ray and the merciless sun. Up in the canyon a family of light in this mansion, cantilevered into the hillside a bridge for a driveway. Luz had shook the preposterous coat to the dirt, and instead, napped naked on a sun-stiffened chase under the lines of a leafless grapevine until dinner. Once Ray approached her, sliding his hand between her knees. She'd groaned too hot for sex. The mink was still heaped out back sculpture of a failure.
Okay, that's good for now I think.
Freeman: I love how everything that happens in the opening pages could have happened in a non-apocalyptic setting within LA, I mean, this could just be a couple in their Hollywood Hills home, lounging around in the sunshine, but very quickly it becomes clear that they're living in a deeply altered world.
And you know, I want to bring in our special guest fairly soon, because she's just written an extraordinary book called the Antidote, which is itself sort of situated between 2 natural disasters, one of them a Dust Bowl of 1935, and the other was the flooding of a river, and out of that has produced this magical confection of a book that well, it deals in similar themes about landscape and memory, and belonging and trust and
Freeman: Why don't we just bring her on. Her name is Karen Russell. Many of you know her. She's the author of 6 books, including Swamplandia!, which was a Pulitzer prize finalist, like Claire. She writes about extreme situations with extraordinary humor, and I think is one of the best voices in America today. Karen, please join us in the California Book Club to ask Claire some questions.
Karen Russell: It's so fun to like, burst out of shadows on Zoom, John. Thank you so much. It really feels like being with family. You know John Freeman and Claire Vaye Watkins. These are 2 of the brightest stars in the firmament. And, Claire, I'm very like lucky to call my dear friend, in addition to someone who would be an intimidating influence. If I if I had the opportunity to be in a room with you, I would. I would admire you from afar, but with like the yeah, with real terror and awe. I was. It was such a joy to reread this. I sort of forgot. Forgive me. I forgot that there's a natural disaster that concludes Gold Fame Citrus as well.
So hopefully there won't be litigation. I don't. I think that it must have imprinted really deeply on. You know I was teaching I was teaching your book recently. I taught this course called other than human nature. and we were looking at your sketches of the neo-fauna of the Dune Sea.
And we talked a lot about sort of how this particular book dissolves the binaries of setting and character, or self and world so like effectively. I love what John was saying about, you know, and you, too, you know, like fantasy and and realism, these categories start to break apart when you look at the scale and the history of this landscape.
I guess I was wondering if you could talk. I mean, I really felt that so deeply. And when I remembered this book before we read it, it's the Dune Sea, that is. You know, it's hard. I'm such a short person, Claire. It's hard to contain. And I thought you did such a beautiful job of getting some sense of geologic time into this book.
And we take these characters so seriously. I mean, I was entirely propelled through and drawn into their human dramas, but somehow we never really lose sight in the same way that these insights are embedded in real bodies. Right? You're, we're always embedded in like a much vaster cosmos. So this is my rambling.
Watkins: Thank you so much.
Russell: Compliment question. Just if you could talk a little bit about. I wonder if you knew that was always going to be part of the book. I think the first time I read Gold Fame Citrus like I like guessed, I mean it was so. It was such a delight and such a surprise. Thank you. I'm like an elderly millennial. So I can't even show the people. You guys know what I'm talking about. Right? It's this.
Watkins: Yeah, that's thank you, my friend, that's.
Russell: I mean also, did you? I assume you drew them, which.
Watkins: No, no. So there's someone at the publishing house at Riverhead was like, I draw, please. Will you do that? Yeah, I love them so much I should get a tattoo of them right away. I just now realized, you know, maybe, that big, crazy jackrabbit, the dumbo.
Russell: I love. I love the Dumbo jackrabbit.
Watkins: Yeah, me, too. Yeah, thanks, though, you know. Like. Yeah, the dune was the first thing I mean. First of all, I know how you feel about Dune.
So thank you for like allowing my to coexist, and I don't know if you're how you feel about Chalamet, how he's treating the property, but I hope you are at peace with how Dune's doing these days. But I would joke. I'd be like this. I'm working on a book called Dune, and you know, like.
Russell: Used to be such a shibboleth for nerds, and now I feel like I have to share it with like cool, hot people. But it's fine! That's my one gripe.
Watkins: Yeah, I, I am glad that they gave us a hot Bob Dylan. I think we could use that, you know, like.
Russell: Yeah, sure.
Watkins: Happened. The sand dune was the first thing, the very first thing that I wrote, and it ends up being like a hundred pages in, or something like that. But yeah, that was like it was basically not that more sophisticated than like getting high and watching planet Earth. And the you know David Attenborough is like.
And I was like, Oh, but dude! What if it wasn't, you know, and I could see these 2 sand dunes that are a part of my life. Dumont Dunes, and then Kelso Dunes in the Mojave desert like coming together, and then sand dunes are very spooky for me, you know, like kids would, people would die there like a lot. There's like the OHV recreation is pretty dangerous. And someone I went to school with his older brother like snapped his neck out there. It was so tragic and sad, and it was just like a very haunted. I never went out there, and it's such. So iconic people come to visit me in the desert, and they're like, let's go to the sand dunes. I'm like you can. I'm not going.
It's hot, and there's nothing. But then, again, people say that about the rest of the Mojave there's nothing, and I'm like, Oh, contraire, it's bristling with life, and you you shan't be paving it, you know. But so then, basically, this is like, what if that sand dune was as alive as I see the rest of the desert being.
Russell: I love that. And I've thought about this quite a bit rereading this book. How much you really reveal that the emptiness of any place is an illusion, and of the fantasies that people have, what a truly destructive one that is wouldn't actually.
Watkins: Yes.
Russell: You know I was thinking a little bit about your mom. If you feel comfortable sharing about this. I know your mom had a natural history museum in this in this landscape, and would sometimes if she maybe didn't know the the Latin word for. Yeah, yeah, I was just curious about. So I was thinking a lot about the stories that we tell, you know, and how there's something sublime and like really tender and moving to about, situating like a house for stories in this voiceless, edgeless, you know. Very old place. I think this novel really holds both kind of like the tenderness of that enterprise. And then also right? You're very. It's very critical of, you know. Stories like, you know, the disastrous, you know, fantasy of manifest destiny, for example, or human exceptionalism generally.
Watkins: Yes, yeah, yeah. And the whole lie of containment, or, like, you know, we would call like a sacrifice zone. Now that we'll do this here, but we won't do it here, because this place is valuable in this place, and later they get, you know, we do get to Yucca mountain. And yeah, that definitely comes from my mom. You know, she was running this little museum and like talking in geologic time all the time. And we, even when it not in the museum, she was just a great storyteller, and, like not scientifically trained, not a science, not a scientist, or even like a super scholarly person, but a wordy person and a bullshitter, and she liked to like entertain herself so she would tell all these, mostly like European tourists like how to not die. And then also, did you know what happened in this place? And look at these hills and this rock is this many millions of years old. And I was like, okay, cool. Yeah, that's interesting. It just like went went into the bank, you know.
Russell: This is a maybe a you know, I loved John's essay. I really loved, you know. How does one end? Such a destructive cycle, you know, and just right the whole, the long history of the legacies of American settler colonialism, like our completely rapacious economy. How do you get out of that destruction. Not since Robert Stone's 1974 Dog Soldiers says, there been a novel written about America's violent present that leans so surreally on hallucinogenic transformation? To answer this question, both novels suggest that some form of escape is not possible. So there's something that feels radical about the whole structure of this book, like its formal playfulness. And also I kept thinking, you know, it's it really resists any kind of easy consolations. I was thinking about Joy Williams Harrow. Friend of mine said, create. It's a place where despair can reside unharassed by hope.
Fully say about Gold Fame Citrus. And it's clear-eyed realism about what we have wrought, and some that some of these losses are irreversible, and since you wrote it in 2015, the trend lines you identified have only seemed to tighten and accelerate. And so, you know, I guess it's a question about Utopias and Dystopias. This book is often referred to as Dystopian.
There's also, you know, so much. I mean, there are seeds of other worlds and ways inside it. So I found myself wondering if you found that maybe reductive in some ways, or if you had another kind of relationship to it, and maybe, as the part B of this very rambly question, if I imagine this book has remained open to your own interpretation as well. So, looking back from 2025, if your understanding has shifted, or if any, you know, I don't know. I'm always like oh, who was that character? I mean? I really feel like I'm coming out of a coma when I read things I've written 10 years ago.
Watkins: Yeah, yeah, no, it. It feels like something from like a fugue state. And it kind of is, you know, because I was like screaming inside when I was writing it. I mean, I was like I had left the West for the first time to go to grad school in Ohio, which is such an aggressively like normal place that I was just became immediately obsessed with my home, and I wrote Battleborn from that like obsession and grief. And then this one was like, it was a time. I know this isn't true now, because I've read a lot more, you know, into, like Mary Austin and Mike Davis and Joy Williams was a huge, huge influence, especially the The Quick and the Dead.
You know. I think there's something in the beginning of The Quick and the Dead about the first image is like a Styrofoam cup getting impaled on a Ocotillo cactus, and that there's drought, and the line is like relief had been promised. Of course. Yeah, so that all and then there. So anyway, I was away, and the water situation in the West was worse and worse and worse. And yet most of the people that I talked to I was living in like Ohio, Pennsylvania, did a little time in New Jersey when I would say like, Oh, I'm writing a book about the water crisis in the West. It was sort of like not not a lot of recognition, and that made me even more like freaked out. And it's almost like the book is like this gland I had to like express to be so gross about it. But like it's like a nightmare novel. And the my efforts, at least at like making it beauty, or beautiful or stylistically interesting or formally fun. The lightness is just because I had to like get through the feeling of basically like my home, which is a fraught home to begin with, and like I have a complicated relationship with it, like all the way down, is also like dying, and no one seems to notice or care, and maybe that is by design. Like hard stuff to get out. And then this form, the novel, seems so forgiving and like you could do whatever in there. It's like, Oh, Mormon history day like, let's do the Mormon exodus. You could. So there's something also like exuberant and so like fun, although I don't know how you feel I feel like it's hell, too, of course, mostly hell.
Russell: Oh, my God, our fun is not everybody's fun. I think I have to. I think I have to leave the halftime show now. With sadness, because I could talk to you for hours about this. But I'm sorry.
Freeman: We're gonna bring you back, Karen. We're going to one more synchronized dance number, because I think Florida and and the West, because they're landscapes that are supposed, that are perceived as something that needs to be tamed and as perceived as hostile to settlement. I think it creates similarities in culture that that are worth talking about.
But to come back just in case anybody who hasn't read the book yet, you know, as we start in this drought world in LA, Luz, Ray and Ig get in a car, drive into the desert. Then something happens. They run out of gas. Ray goes off to get more disappears, as many men often do, and it doesn't give too much away to say that the desert enters the book, and you know I was just blown away by the different ways that the desert was. You know I kept thinking of that skit in SNL in which Chris Farley is El Nino, where he's like, I am El Nino, which would have been the cartoonish, easy way to do that. And you did this amazing thing where the desert is multiple.
It is multiple living things. It is. It is what has been done to it is what is, what is, what lives there, how it's moved, how it's changed, and it's almost like the middle of to the lighthouse where you have this kind of modernist moment, where you kind of the novel opens up. And it does these things you don't typically think novels do. And Karen referred to this. But there is a bestiary in the middle of the book, thanks to Riverhead's drawers, in which my favorite animal is the Stiltwater stilt, Walker Tortoise and then you kind of reenter the story, and Luz is waking up in the back of a school bus close to the community that she she thought she was going to get to. And eventually the new figure of the novel comes in. His name is Levi Zabriskie, who's a kind of self-fashioned prophet who's got a skill of divining water. And so people think he's some kind of God, and he takes that and uses it. But, like many manipulative people, his 1st gig is to prove to convince Luz that he's not the manipulator. But then, eventually, that that comes around.
And I wanted to sort of catch that thread up through the novel because it's the novel is functioning as I don't want to say, a normal novel, but a novel that still isn't giving you the sense that it's on a track as a Utopian dystopian novel, and then you you veer off at many points. And one of the things I wanted I wanted to ask you about is, once you get into that desert, the dune, the expanded dune part of the book, I feel like you're you're taking shots a little bit at former explorers journeys, and what a dystopian novel expects of you and I. You've been such a protean writer about genre, Battleborn is constantly breaking out of the Tom Mcguin model of stories that maybe inspired some of them, and I love you. But I've chosen. Darkness is also, you know, constantly ripping off its auto fictional straitjacket to be like. Ha! Ha! I'm actually made up. I'm a novel. And Gold Fame Citrus is doing the same thing with Dystopian and Utopian stories, and I wonder like how you could, what you could say about that instinct of you to sort of sap in plain sight, but without being commentary, be a commentary, and being a critic about it.
Broken narratives like, what? Why does? Why do you have to kind of get your BB gun out and shoot those in the head.
Watkins: I don't know. I'm just an Aries, you know. I'm new. I'm new here. It's my first day. Basically, I just have an honorary part of me. I need a lot of friction, I guess, and I like to write like the thing that I can't really write like right at the edge of that. And then also, yeah, there's definitely a kind ofmm, I don't know, trying to counterbalance all of the boosterism and the American exceptionalism and the like romantic, you know nostalgia and romanticization. That was, I don't know just kind of writing it as a time when I was learning more about actual like. What profound damage that had been done, you know. Taking that impulse to like, take it, you know, and yet like I also can't deny that I have a real like strong tether to my home, you know, which is stolen, and I know that, and like always just thinking about what the that unacknowledged carnage does like it go. It seems like it goes again not to get like 2 Union. But you know it goes down and like we feel it all like, there's this like buzz and hum of people seen in the West are white people mostly are really meticulous about their genealogy until about like 1850 years. So you know, or like and I'm a huge Didion person. Huge, huge Didion fan, you know, but that that, like iconic origin story of like her family coming over Donner Pass, and if it had gone another way, and everyone feeling like simultaneously being suspicious.
Maybe, like, I'm definitely not suspicious enough or hostile enough to the narrative of like that enabled manifest destiny and continued, like exploitation, like, God, God wants you to have this lithium mine. God wants you to start uranium mining in the Navajo nation again, which is apparently happening. Anyway. Yeah, I guess it's just sort of this outlet for all the anger, probably, you know, and and the growing up on the page, and then resisting the genre, resisting the conventions maybe, is related to that just again. I don't know not to be unkind to myself, but it does. It was my first try at writing a novel. So some of it was just I needed so much energy, you know. Some of it would be a formal thing. Maybe I write a bestiary today. Some of it would be the fire was coming from a like really deep place of rage.
Freeman: Are you a fan of, or have you read Rebecca Solnit's book? I think it's called Savage Dreams.
Watkins: I haven't read that one, but I do love Solnit a lot, and I really like her thesis, the unfinished, the ongoingness of the Indian wars.
Freeman: Yeah, I thought about her when I was reading this, because so much this book is if you, if you get a chance to read it. If you haven't read it, I cannot recommend it more highly.
It's a book that makes you want to learn more about history as well. If you don't know your Western history. And so I started reading all sorts of things to the side where I suddenly was like, no, no, you actually have to reread the book Freeman, and one of the things I came across was just that under Buchanan they built roads specifically for settlers to come from what is now New Mexico, up and up into you know what is now Nevada, and to go towards where the gold rush was happening, and specifically for them to use. And and you know you don't need to extrapolate that very much to understand like roads specifically for settlers. Oh, what does that remind me of? And it's in every colonial experiment that has all these similarities. And one of the things that I love so much about this book is that the sort of this the dune sea takes up so much energy as a character and a place that it ultimately kind of squashes the the repetition pattern of that, because it ultimately says, well, this pattern might continue, but I'm eternal, and you're all going to end up in me eventually. And so someone in the audience had asked, Where do you go for hope? And I found that weirdly hopeful that eventually we will all return to geologic time.
It's not like the damage that was done to the planet will be undone, but that the planet will take back what we have taken from us by taking us back. And that's a very dark form of hope. But I wonder if that's one of the things that you found yourself arriving at. As this book was coming towards its kind of hallucinogenic end.
Watkins: Yeah, I do think there's like a burial thing that's happening here, you know. And I remember feeling like elation at the idea of burying, Las Vegas specifically, you know, and just and and you know, that's a really like potent. You feel that presence. And it's almost like being imminent in that way, just in the same way where it seems now we are like forever on the cusp of a constitutional crisis. And I'm like, I think I like have a timeshare on this cusp. I've been here so long humming at the edge of the crisis that you just I don't know. I have an impulse and want to like, just do it. It's dark. It is a dark impulse, but also I think it's like a ritualistic impulse like bury that.
And yeah, most of it will go back to dust right. There'll be a little band of radioactivity in the fossil record that's pretty dark to think about. But I'm not going to go there right now.
Freeman: But how do you? How do you? I mean one of the things that I think is the biggest challenge of living in our time and in a climate crisis that we've made our planet inhabitable for us, and many other species is to somehow tell stories in which the human does not always operate at the very center of it. And I feel like your book is this shining example of how to do it? And I'm so blown away by that. And and yet I think the big challenge spiritually sort of culturally, habitually, is like how to sort of detune ourselves. So we can get closer to that idea that if we don't survive.
Maybe that's a good thing, and that's such a dark thing to say. But that's kind of where the book is going.
Watkins: I don't really actually believe that it's just an idea that gives me a right sized quality. But I really think what I've come through now, and like writing Gold Fame Citrus was a really important part of it is, I'm actually like, very in love with humanity and existence, and I think we could do much, much, much better, like use our resources much, much more wisely. We know how to stop climate change, you know. We don't have like the political will, but like a political system, is something we made, and it's something that can be unmade. And I have to. I've come to be surprisingly like life affirming through all of this again, like expressing that gland, you know. So I don't think the like geologic thinking is basically just to like kind of like, pull the nose up. But also that's how I lived like I live in relation to these old ass mountains, and I look at them all the time. So I think and I just it just gets me off to think in terms of billions of years, you know. But really I think the now is, we don't get to pick our moment. We have to treat it as if as if it is like a miracle, like a gift to be born like I have a little posted in my house, something you said at a bookstore reading last time you were in LA, or last time I saw you in LA. That says you could have been born a lemon tree, you know, which I understand to mean something like, and said, you were born a human, you know, who can language and feel and intimacy and build and make different decisions.
We have that like capacity, at least, even though obviously that is not the reality right now. But the truth is not going to go away like climate change is really happening, and it is almost this invisible, unacknowledged force. I'm like, think watching public lands be plundered in this like so-called emergency for rare Earth lithium uranium, I mean, there's a uranium mine that the Trump Administration is going to approve in like 14 days. Normally it takes one year to do environmental review but 2 weeks to decide about a uranium mine, anyway. Sorry to bring you in there, but.
Freeman: No, I love that you found a capacity to be both concerned, full of gloom, but also deeply hopeful and happy that you've been born as this species. There is a form of self-hating humanity that is a form of voluptuous decadence, I think, and that also precipitates the sense of that there's nothing that can be done. And and you know Rebecca Solnit has been mentioned. But it's worth saying that you know her book, Hope In The Dark is very good about this, and I think she's got another book about hope coming up. The book that I mentioned is called Savage Dreams, which is about the the entwinement of destruction and preservation in the West as forces of that have shaped it. But it's nice to hear that you feel that way, because there are these moments where I wake up, or I see something, you know, often out in the West, and you're clobbered with wonder and appreciation. That part of being human. The instrument of is that we are an instrument of praise. You know that we're not just here to take but to praise, and that's because maybe a lemon tree can't do that. But I want to bring Karen Russell back on from the margins here, because I think you know, Karen, you've threaded this line between the sort of the Gothic and the phantasmagorical, and the sort of wondrous so beautifully in your own work, and I wonder if, like. In rereading Karen's book, you found some similarities between how landscape shaped your imagination, and your sense of, and possibility and and terror.
Russell: Oh, my God, what a gorgeous segue! Also! I'm sorry I didn't backflip into my chair. If I could, I would have you know. I just wanted to just strongly echo what Claire said so beautifully. I think that's interestingly, yeah. I crawled through a lot of despair, and I exited my own. Our fun is not everybody's fun, you know. Years long excavation with hope, too. And I was rereading this I was thinking about. Actually, this is the section right, not to like. Read you to you, but you know.
Luz loves this book. She loves these drawings she loves, realizing that language and art can help her to see the liveliness that you know has been occluded from her sight. And it's like it's like you sort of move up the Maslow's hierarchy. It's like it's not. It's not just brute survival, right? It's like she can really see green again. Now as a gift of this book, and she says now there were tortoises out of dali and technicolor lizards and wandering trees. For Ig. Suddenly this was a land of kud, flamboyant, vibrant, polychrome, and iridescent. There was turquoise, pink, olive, yellow, and red, glossy red, black, with a white bow tie, the taste of blood and vinegar, acid pools and poison, webery, egg suckers and salt munchers, mucus slurpers and vampires, so many inspired ways to eat and to be eaten, and what was vibrancy, but being very, very alive. She and Ig were an example in her mind.
It was soon very obvious that the world was made of unseen wonders which we might call miracles. A little bit later they discover to their amazement, right? Something that they struggle to name. Building comes after Claire's incredible description of these like future ruins. And I love that too kind of the delay, because you can really see it for a second before building eclipses what you've just been struggling to apprehend, and a second later they find a shimmering square of jade fluid, liquid light, ribboning so much color. It stung soft turquoise, streaked with evergreen algae, and above gold. Grassy water plants grew at the cracks of the pool, and a pump burbled somewhere. Impossible! Luz could not adjust to the languid green of it all. The parts of her eyes for processing green had perhaps atrophied. So I read that, and I was like truly like moved in my core, because then I could see green, too. And I you know I it's a shame that thirst is what stirs up our reverence for water, but like a book like this really can. And I mean, I think you can have like a mystical appreciation for it, but also like a deeply practical animal, one.
Watkins: Yeah. Yeah. And that to me is a real like. Also, there's a pragmatic like the organizing that I've been. A part of around water is different and not so subject to this stuck, impacted red team. Blue team, you know Toni Morrison called it like the Pepsi Coke challenge, you know not Pepsi at this point given. There's cocaine in the Coca-cola, but like it's water, you know, is like fundamental, and I feel that way about. If I don't know if I were King. That's what we would be working on right.
Russell: Yeah, from our timeshare on the cusp.
Watkins: Yeah, I'm yeah. I guess we just are going to be. I don't know. You can't know where you are in a process when you're in the process, you know. Yeah, I think I wanted to just let them have a nice moment at the pool, too. You know.
Russell: Yeah, yeah, I mean, what John said is true also, right? I think, capturing the tonal complexity of any moment, including one where things are dramatically worse than our, you know relative comfort right now. It seems like something the book does so beautifully.
Watkins: It's amazing to like, do this with those part, like in most realms of life, being able to be so like or being so sensitive. And I just it's hard for me to go to the grocery store, you know. So it's amazing that I could like do this with that, those feelings, and it did help a lot to get purchase on those moments, even if it was a fugue, and I don't really remember most of it.
Russell: I will say, too, because we we talked a little bit less about Ig, I really appreciate, you know, that motherhood does transform this character, but does it like, save the world?
Watkins: Yeah, that's definitely. I was revising this all the way up to going into labor with my daughter Esme. And it's like fear. It's basically like the childless person's nightmare. It's like nightmare expression, part of like. What if you don't know what you're doing and you get poop on?
Freeman: Well, I'm afraid the I don't want to end on poop, but sometimes sometimes the best days do. It's been so lovely to see both of you, and to talk about these really important issues, but also just to talk about this extraordinary book, which like all really really good books has this alive quality. I feel like I took it off the shelf, and it was like having this wild animal in my hands that was like, no, I'm not this. I'm this. Wait a second. Here you can. You can feed me water and it's just a it's it's thrilling to see that a 10 year old book. This gets more relevant, not just for the the scary reasons, but for the the reasons that you just described, that it describes intimacy in ways that I feel like we need watered in us constantly like we there is. We will die of thirst if we don't encounter reflected intimacy in that way, even if we have intimacy in our lives. And it's such a strange thing to be those kinds of people. That's you know why we are people of the book, and why we're so grateful for this particular book.
Watkins: Thanks, John and Karen and everyone. It was a nice little trip down horror memory lane with you guys.
Freeman: Yeah. Well, I hope I hope to see you in the real world. I'm sorry I missed you in New York, Karen, Claire. I'm sure. I'll see you again very soon. Blaise, do you want to come back on and tell people where to go from here?
Zerega: Absolutely. Absolutely. And wow, just you know. Big. Thank you. To three of you, Claire, Karen, John, I mean, like Karen I was doing backflips. This book makes me do backflips. Thank you. So again, please support our authors, go out and buy their books, visit independent bookstore, pick up copies. Tonight's program was recorded, and will be up on altaonline.com tomorrow. You'll also receive a thank you note in tomorrow's email, with links to all the different books that were mentioned, the topics that were discussed, and please be sure to join us next month.
We will host Manjula Martin in her book The Last Fire Season. There's a theme going on here and to close out one last appeal for support. There's all kinds of links in the chat, and there'll be a link in tomorrow's email would really appreciate your support. So please become a member of Alta Journal. You'll get this fantastic cartoon book. It's a collection of the 5 years worth of the the back page of our magazine. They're funny. They're really really good, if you like cartoons, you'll love this.
And finally, we'd be grateful if you would participate in a 1 min survey that's going to pop up as soon as we sign off. We really appreciate your feedback and tell us what we can do better what you like, so forth. So that's all I have. So stay well, everybody, and I hope to see you next month and thank you again. This is just extraordinary. Really appreciate everyone taking their time tonight. Thank you. •
