… Appraisals is about water rights and marriage and local farms and parenting and zoning laws and grandmothers, which is to say it is about the emotional impacts of climate anxiety in rural spaces, how these issues put us at odds with, or, more hopefully, draw us closer to the people we love. … I did not want to write a memoir, and I did not want to write essays. I wanted to write a novel in which the water crisis of the American West was “redeemed by the imagination.” For models of how to keep the polemic from overpowering the personal, I turned to other writers working in the subset of climate fiction that I call contemporary agrarian.