In August Riverhead Books added to its literary roster Claire Vaye Watkins and her debut story collection, Battleborn, a title derived from the motto on Nevada’s state flag. “Battle Born” refers to the fact that Nevada joined the Union during the Civil War, in 1864, and in Watkins’s book the motto suggests the state’s history as well. All the stories are set there or just west, across the border in California, some in the present day, tinged with the glitz and despair of Las Vegas and the smaller towns that orbit it. Others take place in the past and are set in the area’s more remote locations—during the gold rush in the Sierra Nevadas. But along with capturing Nevada’s place as part of the mythic West, the stories express something larger.

They are distinctly American in their exploration of our desire to re-create ourselves, to follow the same impulses that have driven generations westward in search of freedom and fortune, those that have led to our greatest triumphs and our deepest failures. Riverhead editor Rebecca Saletan, who won the hotly contested auction for the book, says that Watkins’s writing is distinguished by “a blend of toughness and tenderness—an attention to ‘ordinary people’ that refuses to sentimentalize or miniaturize or flatten them, a sense of scope that refuses to accept the usual dichotomy between the ambitious and important on the one hand, and the minute and human-scale. The stories are both, and that is deeply satisfying, and much rarer than it should be.”

When literary agent Nicole Aragi encountered Watkins’s writing, she was immediately drawn to her “incredible ability to write about place and landscape,” an American landscape, she says, that she hadn’t read before. Aragi, whose clients include Junot Díaz, Jonathan Safran Foer, Colson Whitehead, Edwidge Danticat, and Hannah Tinti, first read Watkins’s work in the winter of 2008, in an online supplement to Granta’s “Fathers” issue. “It was a very short piece about her sister and her father in the desert. It was so powerful. The way you got everything: siblings, her relationship with her father, family history, landscape…I still can’t believe she did so much in such a short piece. And I thought, ‘This is a storyteller.’”

Watkins, twenty-eight, is an assistant professor at Bucknell University, a private liberal arts college in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. The place couldn’t be more different from Pahrump, Nevada, near the southeastern edge of Death Valley, where she grew up. “Writers and sculptors and costume designers and filmmakers—every single person in my family and extended family, they’re all artists,” says Watkins. Along with practicing art—her mother was a photographer and her father a musician—her parents ran the Shoshone Museum, a tourist destination that showcased the natural and cultural history of the Death Valley area and sold maps, gems, jewelry, and other local trinkets.

What brought her parents to the Mojave Desert…now that’s a story. Or is it? Yes, because for Americans it intersects with one of the darker events that capped the end of the psychedelic sixties. And no, because for Watkins the story doesn’t get her any closer to understanding the truth about her father, who died when she was six years old.

But here goes: At seventeen, Watkins’s father, Paul, originally from the Los Angeles area, met and befriended Charles Manson, eventually becoming a member of the Manson Family. Some versions of the story have it that he was, for a time, Manson’s right-hand man. Manson sent Watkins to the remote area of Death Valley to scout locations for the family to hide out from “Helter Skelter,” Manson’s term for the racial war he predicted would wreak havoc on American society. Watkins became increasingly wary of Manson, requesting at one point to be officially relieved of his duties to the family. He was in Death Valley when the brutal Tate–LaBianca murders took place, and eventually testified against Manson during the ensuing trials. 

Drawn to the landscape, Paul Watkins ended up staying in the area, where he met and settled down with Claire’s mother, who moved there from Las Vegas, where she’d been raised and had worked into her twenties. 

Watkins first learned about her father’s connection to the Manson Family from the book Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Family (Norton, 1974) by Vincent Bugliosi, the prosecuting attorney for the trial. “I was in grade school. My sister came home crying from school because some kid had been teasing her and saying our dad was a murderer. She was really upset, and when our mom got home from work, we confronted her about it. She gave us Helter Skelter, which was on our bookshelf. She said, ‘I’ll tell you, he didn’t kill anyone, but if you want to know more about it, then read this.’ So we looked him up in the index and read it.” 

For Watkins, her father’s involvement in the Manson Family doesn’t really shed light on who he was. It’s an anecdote from his past, but it is only one of the ways she’s come to know him. “It is the cache of information—especially media—that I have of him: books and news clips and all that. There’s this process of layering information and history and facts and knowledge on oneself and yet feeling like you don’t have any better sense of who you are than when you started. That’s probably close to how I feel about the Manson business.”

Since she was a child Watkins was drawn to writing: “It seemed like a natural way of expression for me. I always wrote in a diary,” she says. “But it didn’t really occur to me that writers were living, like right now, until I was in college, really.” That Watkins made it to college was a feat in itself. At first she wanted to be a filmmaker, but “bungled the whole college-admissions process,” as she puts it. “No one in my family had ever gone to college, so I didn’t really understand how you paid for it. I thought you paid for it at the end, kind of like at a restaurant. So, I was going to go to the University of California at Santa Cruz. I got a bill for, like, thirty thousand dollars in the summer, and I just laughed. I think I threw it away.” When she received the second bill, she realized she’d have to come up with another plan.

After taking a year off, Watkins enrolled at the University of Nevada in Reno (UNR), where she attended on a scholarship established by the state of Nevada, which had sued tobacco companies on behalf of the state’s residents, especially children. “There were day cares and things in casinos,” says Watkins. “Every kid who graduated high school with a 3.0 could go to a Nevada university for free, so that’s how I ended up at UNR.”

Once there, Watkins studied with fiction writer Christopher Coake, author, most recently, of the novel You Came Back (Grand Central Publishing, 2012). He took her under his wing and encouraged her to pursue an MFA at Ohio State, where he had gone. Watkins followed Coake’s advice and moved to Columbus. And it was Coake who, at the annual Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference, introduced Watkins to John Freeman, who’d just become the American editor of Granta. 

“Granta happened to be doing an issue about fathers at the time,” Watkins recalls. “John mentioned this to Chris, and Chris said, ‘I know somebody who has written a really cool, short essay about her father.’ Which wasn’t true—I hadn’t written anything about it. I met John eventually at the conference, and he said, ‘Chris said you’re working on something, and you should send it to me.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, yeah, I’ll send it to you. Sure.’ And then I went back to the hostel where I was staying and wrote something.”

Freeman ended up publishing Watkins’s short piece online, and it immediately caught Aragi’s attention, so much so that she broke one of her cardinal rules. “John and I had agreed when he first started working for Granta and taking on new writers that we would observe ‘church and state’ rules,” says Aragi, who lives with Freeman in New York City. The unwritten rules stipulated that Aragi wouldn’t look for clients among Freeman’s stable of contributors, and Freeman wouldn’t look for contributors on Aragi’s client list. “And I was very good about them, until he showed me her piece. And then I went, ‘Can I have her phone number?’ To which he said, ‘We don’t do that.’ And I said, ‘Give me her phone number.’” 

It’s true that Watkins’s short piece was in part about her father, but that particular fact didn’t strike Aragi as terribly important. In fact, Aragi, who is from England, didn’t know who Paul Watkins was. “I have to admit I didn’t know anything about him. I’m remarkably ignorant about the whole Manson story,” says Aragi. “I think everyone in America knows the whole Manson story backwards, but I wasn’t perhaps the most informed.” Instead, it was Watkins’s facility with compression and her ability to write about place and landscape that impressed Aragi. “She is an American writer in many senses.” 

Aragi contacted Watkins and soon after took her on as a client. But it was difficult at first for Watkins to write under the pressure of having an agent. “I was pretty freaked out by it, because I wasn’t looking for an agent. My goal was to leave my MFA program with a manuscript that I could think about maybe starting to send to agents,” Watkins says. “Suddenly I wasn’t writing for just a little group—my workshop. In the short term, it was kind of crippling, to be honest, but eventually I got over it and felt really, really, really lucky.”

The MFA program at Ohio State awarded Watkins the Presidential Fellowship, an annual university-wide award given to a handful of graduate students. “It gives you an additional year of full funding,” she says. “I just wrote and read for a year, and that’s when I finished Battleborn.” 

Two years after she and Aragi began working together, the book was ready to be sent to publishers. Watkins had spent a good deal of time crafting it, in workshops and on her own. As she finished stories, she’d send them to Aragi. “She would say, ‘Keep going, keep going, that’s good, keep going.’” says Watkins. “She never said, ‘What’s the endgame here?’”

Watkins’s vision for the book was clear from the start. She knew she wanted it to be about Nevada, and she set for herself formal challenges. “I would think about a place in Nevada, and I would write a story from there. But I didn’t want any two stories to be too similar, in terms of point of view, or psychic distance, or aesthetics, or language.” It is this range that is one of the striking powers of the book. The stories are connected by their settings but, as Saletan says, “thrillingly idiosyncratic” in their structure, and yet each is accomplished and authentic in its own right. Which is perhaps why, when Aragi sent out the manuscript, ten major publishers—Grove; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Random House; Norton; Little, Brown; HarperCollins; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; Bloomsbury; Holt; and Riverhead—competed for the opportunity to publish it. 

Saletan says when she first read Watkins’s stories, she was struck immediately by the voice. “It was like nothing I’d read before. The stories were desolate and tender, hard and intimate all at once. I also loved the boldness with which she takes every myth, every stereotype about the West head on, including the ones about her father and the Manson Family, and claims them for her own to reimagine.”

Before the book’s U.S. publication, Watkins travelled abroad for the first time, to promote the foreign editions ofBattleborn. Rights were sold in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Holland, which, Aragi says, is especially impressive, given that the market for short story collections in those countries is even more difficult than it is in ours. 

“I’ve been incredibly impressed at Claire’s self-possession,” says Saletan about working with the author to publish her debut. “She had a strange and hard upbringing, and with the approach of publication have come all sorts of new experiences. With each new step I have been struck by her lack of pretense: She seems to genuinely take in and appreciate each new experience while remaining very much herself. Many far more experienced writers could learn from her in that respect.”

Mary Gannon is the editorial director of Poets & Writers, Inc.