Home and place infuse the writings of authors, and married couple, Claire Vaye Watkins and Derek Palacio.
On Saturday, at the Las Vegas Book Festival, Palacio will be on the panel, “On Immigration: How do we define Home?” Vaye Watkins will be on the panel, “There’s Always Some There There: Writing about Place.”
Claire Vaye Watkins is currently Shearing Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute at UNLV. She is the author of the book of short stories, “Battleborn,” and the novel, “Gold Fame Citrus.”
Derek Palacio, is also a Shearing Fellow at BMI – He is the author of “How to Shake the Other Man” and “The Mortifications” – both works of fiction.
“I think the overlap between our two books are sort of the way the homes of the characters become unreturnable to. You can’t go back,” Palacio says.
In "Gold Fame Citrus," Vaye Watkins paints a picture of a southwestern United States with no water and a landscape so scorched and abandoned that only a few people call it home.
“It wasn’t a heroic act of the imagination to envision an American Southwest that has run out of water,” she said, “I think desert folks out in Tecopa and Pahrump where I grew up are really in touch with the fragility of the natural world right now.”
"The Mortifications" is set in Hartford, Connecticut. Palacio grew up in New Hampshire, but his roots are in Cuba. “I grew up thinking [New England] is a nice place to live but there was always a little part of me that kind of feels in the wind,” Palacio said.
Vaye Watkins said having a nomadic mind and a sense of roaming is important for a writer.
Palacio said they both understand how to know a place intimately but then leave it and look back on that place from a different perspective.
“Once you leave a place you can see it differently. You get another layer of understanding." he said.
Claire Vaye Watkins, author, "Battleborn" and "Gold Fame Citrus"; Derek Palacio, author, "How to Shake the Other Man" and "The Mortifications."
