Claire Vaye Watkins on Grief That Becomes a Landscape

“I thought: Something is really happening to me. I wouldn't say I'm having postpartum depression, I would say that I'm like... having visions. Or that my true self is exploding forward."

Claire Vaye Watkins was one of the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” and one of Granta's "Best Young American Novelists." She is the author of I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness, Gold Fame Citrus and Battleborn, which won the Story Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. A Guggenheim Fellow, Watkins is also the co-director of the Mojave School, a free creative writing workshop for teenagers in rural Nevada.