Writing a Love Letter to the Mojave Desert

The Mojave Desert is in Claire Vaye Watkins’s DNA. She was born in Bishop, four hours away from Tecopa, the town in Death Valley where her parents lived, which had no hospital, raised in Tecopa and across the state line in Pahrump, Nevada. Growing up in the Mojave, she told John Freeman for Alta’s California book club, your reality is “draining lakes and bombing places…making them toxic for effectively ever.”