Watkins is uninterested in memoir, to the point of being averse to it. “Out here a person could get turned around and lose his own trail,” she writes in the story “Man-O-War,” “each stretch of nothing looking like the next, east looking like south looking like west, not knowing where he came on the lake bed, and not knowing how to get home.”Īs grounded as they are in real places, the stories are fictions, crafted with the skill of an artisan, working from the starting points of Mary Gaitskill and Aimee Bender. There are intimacies and secrets, betraying friends, fierce women, failed love affairs, a dangerous brother, a ghost, a beloved baby, an old man, alone.

These are places often seen by people passing through, but Watkins tells the tales from the locals’ points of view.

The stories are set in Nevada: in an apartment in Reno, the tourist town Virginia City, the Las Vegas strip, the Cherry Patch Ranch brothel in Pahrump. That state’s unofficial nickname, which comes from its incorporation during the Civil War, gives “Battleborn” its title. She had grown up with her parents in the tiny California town of Tecopa, in the Mojave after her father died, her mother remarried, moving the family to Nevada. It was in the green hills of Ohio that Watkins began conjuring the arid West of her childhood for these stories. She went on to get an MFA in creative writing from Ohio State University. I thought you got a bill at the end, like when you go to a restaurant.” The first university graduate in her family, she says, “I didn’t understand that you had to pay for college. She describes her childhood as alternately poor and working class.

Now in her late 20s, Claire is an assistant professor of English at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania.

Battleborn by Claire Vaye Watkins