Paul Watkins' daughter (Claire Vaye Watkins)
has weaved a collection of short stories,
into a new book Titled "Battleborn".
Claire Vaye Watkins is a Nevadan whose fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Granta, Ploughshares, One Story, The Paris Review and elsewhere. She holds a BA from the University of Nevada, Reno and an MFA from Ohio State University, where she was a Presidential Fellow. Watkins' collection of short stories, Battleborn, is forthcoming from Riverhead Books. She teaches creative writing at Bucknell University.
"For writer Claire Vaye Watkins her life has been lived in the shadow of her father, Charles Manson’s right-hand man, but in her debut story collection she breaks free to capture the American West with beauty and power. She speaks to Claiborne Smith about her hunger for Nevada, her mother’s death, and her fiction." Claiborne Smith
"Battleborn, is a remarkable debut of short stories". Jenny Shank
The following was written by Geoff Mak on July 30, 2012
Joan Didion writes in her essay “The White Album” that the cultural paranoia known as “the Sixties” had ended — or rather been fulfilled — on August 9, 1969. That night, four members of Charles Manson’s “Family” broke into 10050 Cielo Drive and stabbed Sharon Tate Polanski, eight months pregnant, a total of sixteen times. Shortly after, as Paul Watkins and other members of the Manson Family watched a television report of the murders, somebody turned to him and said, “Wouldn’t it be somethin’ if old Charlie did that?”
Paul Watkins had been just out of high school when he joined the Manson Family. He was a former class president with a handsome face, and a smile sweet enough to recruit young girls to the commune. After the Manson murders, Watkins would ultimately testify against Charles Manson. He would outlive the Sixties. He would become president of the Death Valley Chamber of Commerce, appear on CNN, raise two daughters. On his deathbed, he would tape a video for his daughters, beginning with, “Here I am, my girls. I want you to know how much I loved you. I want you to know who I was.”
This is not the story his daughter Claire Vaye Watkins tells in “Ghost, Cowboys,” which opens her sweeping debut story collection Battleborn. Instead, “Ghost, Cowboys” explores the stories from Death Valley as a whole, in which her own family history plays only a small episode.
The narrator begins her story in 1859, when a man named Charles Fuller builds a toll bridge that was to become Reno decades later. Then, the narrator flashes forward to 1941, when George Spahn converts his ranch into a lucrative movie set. And yet again to 1968, when a group of ten hitchhikers offer George to “help” with chores if he gives them permission to “camp out” in the empty set buildings. Two of those ten are the characters Charles Manson and Paul Watkins.
Continued...
For more on Watkin's book, "Click" Below:==============================================
Kimchi writes:
I've always liked this tribute video, that the Watkins girls did for their mother. It also includes rare photos of Paul too!