I've chosen to work with a short story called "Ghosts, Cowboys," the first piece included in Claire Vaye Watkins' debut collection of short fiction, Battleborn. In a review of the text, Antonya Nelson (for The New York Times) writes that this particular story
can be read as a literary fractal of the book over all. The historical sits comfortably alongside the contemporary, and the factual nicely supplements the fictional. With this beginning, Watkins sets the terms for the reader's experience of the book, establishing the recurrent concerns of the collection: storytelling and myth-busting, knowing the past and surviving the present.
The events of "Ghosts, Cowboys" appear to have actually happened (or so says a shallow Wikipedia dip), so the author insists that the reader ask, "Why fictionalize?" The story works in the manner of a core sample: examine an isolated piece of real estate and plunge deep into its concentrated substance. The target spot is Reno; the unearthed substance is its legendary inhabitants and their legacy of infamy. Claire Watkins, author as well as narrator, understands that "the story" is "too much," yet she perseveres nonetheless to try to tell it true.
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