Claire Vaye Watkins was born in California and brought up in the Mojave desert, Nevada; her debut novel, Gold Fame Citrus, uses this territory as the backdrop for a terrifying vision of a world without water. Watkins is also the author of the award-winning story collection Battleborn.
Gold Fame Citrus imagines a future US south-west enduring permanent drought, and cut off from the rest of the world. Where did the idea come from?
The way I went about writing was by looking to the past. I was born in an area of California called the Owens Valley, and the Owens Valley was the site of what was called the California water wars in the 1920s, which was when the city of Los Angeles built their aqueduct systems because they realised they didn’t have enough water to make this major metropolis happen, and this dream of manifest destiny, the paradise, the Eden of America, come true. So they built this aqueduct system and one of the lakes it drained was Owens Lake, near where I was born.
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