Claire Boyles is a writer and former farmer. Her debut novel, “Appraisals,” was published in August 2026. A 2022 Whiting Award winner in fiction, she is the author of “Site Fidelity,” which won the High Plains Book Award. Her nonfiction has appeared in Sierra Magazine and Virginia Quarterly Review, among other journals, and she is a screenwriter with multiple credits on the Hallmark Channel. She splits time between Loveland, Colorado, and Ames, Iowa, where she is an assistant professor of creative writing and the environment at Iowa State University.
SunLit: Tell us this book’s backstory – what’s it about and what inspired you to write it?
Claire Boyles: “Appraisals” is about a family of small-scale vegetable farmers on Colorado’s Eastern Plains during the Great Recession. It’s told from three different perspectives. Maggie, the farmer, is idealistic, committed to the idea of local foodsheds and what would now be called regenerative agriculture.
Her husband, Fish, after a long period of unemployment, takes a job with an oil and gas company, which alienates Maggie and their teenage daughter Ozzie. Maggie’s grandmother, Flora, 90-years-old, reacts to the sale of the farm she lost during the 1980s Farm Crisis to a mysterious rich outsider by reconsidering how best to live whatever years she has left, which leads her toward some light monkeywrenching and other environmental protest with Ozzie.
UNDERWRITTEN BY
Each week, The Colorado Sun and Colorado Humanities & Center For The Book feature an excerpt from a Colorado book and an interview with the author. Explore the SunLit archives at coloradosun.com/sunlit.
The book came out of my own lineage as a woman farmer on a small-scale farm. Until I was 8 years old, I lived on the far end of my grandparents’ fruit farm in Ohio, which had an apple orchard and a strawberry patch and peach trees. My grandmother, Lois, ran the farm, and my mother, MaryAnne, was in charge of the cider press in the fall. At the time, neither of them considered themselves farmers, but I can see now that they were.
Lois was the first woman I ever saw drive a tractor, and when my husband and I started our own farm, in 2008, my grandparents gave us that tractor, a 1952 Allis Chalmers CA tricycle, still a hardworking beast in a small field like ours. (Allis, as we called the tractor, has a cameo in the book.)
We grew vegetables and specialty cut flowers and raised chickens and turkeys and hogs, and we built a strong community of market customers, Community-Supported Agriculture members, and fellow small farmers. However, the housing crash of the Great Recession left us deep underwater on our mortgage, and we could not recover from the resulting loss of access to credit.
In 2013, we sold the farm at a loss, barely avoiding bankruptcy and foreclosure. I became, during that time, fascinated with the ways land management, especially coupled with the external forces of resource extraction and economic distress, so deeply affected my relationships with myself, my loved ones, and my community. I remain fascinated with these issues, especially in the context of climate change, and the book was a way to continue to explore them.
SunLit: How does the excerpt you chose fit into the book as a whole and why did you select it?
Boyles: This excerpt starts at the beginning of the first chapter from Maggie’s perspective and then jumps to the end of that chapter, skipping some scenes in the middle. It sets up how much Fish and Maggie love each other, and how surprised they are, after so many years of happiness, to find themselves at odds.
“Appraisals”
Where to find it:
- Prospector: Search the combined catalogs of 23 Colorado libraries
- Libby: E-books and audio books
- NewPages Guide: List of Colorado independent bookstores
- Bookshop.org: Searchable database of bookstores nationwide
SunLit present new excerpts from some of the best Colorado authors that not only spin engaging narratives but also illuminate who we are as a community. Read more.
SunLit: “Appraisals” touches on some of the more urgent concerns in rural, agricultural Colorado – like water issues, economic hardship and the vanishing family farm. Did you want to make statements about any or all of these challenges, or did they simply provide a backdrop for the character-driven narrative?
Boyles: Originally, I thought that having such deep real-life experience with farming would make this book easier to write, but the opposite turned out to be true. It was hard to separate all of my opinions about these issues—the value of local foodsheds, regenerative practices, water law and the water crisis, and the impact of oil and gas development on rural communities—from what I know good fiction does, which is center character and relationship.
It took a lot of revision and ruthless cutting to get what my wonderful editor once called “mini-essays” about farming out of the story. It helped to focus on the complexities of the issues and what I don’t know about them.
For example, I don’t know what the world will look like if ownership of land and water rights continues to consolidate into fewer and fewer hands, and I don’t know how to detangle the problem of water in Colorado because of the disconnect in how the system is set up, with the resource itself a public trust but the right to use it a private holding. Once I realized I just needed to write about the impacts of that in my characters’ everyday lives, I was able to focus on the emotional threads of the story.
SunLit: Your short story collection, “Site Fidelity,” met with great success. How was the process of writing “Appraisals,” a novel, different from a creative standpoint?
Boyles: From a craft perspective, it took me a long time to find the structure of the novel. I wasn’t used to having to make a story move for such an extended period of time, and I also got a little overly ambitious. For example, one draft of the book had three different timelines and at least two extraneous primary characters. Over the six years I worked on the book, I also wrote a bunch of holiday romantic comedies for the Hallmark Channel, and though that is obviously a very different genre, the scriptwriting did eventually help me figure out the novel’s pacing. Even just asking myself what I thought the midpoint of the novel was, and realizing I had to get there in 40 to 45 thousand words, changed the whole game.
From a more personal perspective, the success of “Site Fidelity” made the novel feel very high stakes. Except in workshops, I had never had the experience of having my work so closely dissected and publicly reviewed, and even with the mostly positive reception, it took a while to silence those voices during the drafting of “Appraisals.” I wanted to be sure I was still making the art that I wanted to make, not just writing toward reviews or sales.
The multiple failed drafts I wrote over the years were a challenge to my artistic confidence and persistence. I am very grateful for the encouragement and support of my editor and my agent, and I am also very grateful that I never have to write my second book again.
SunLit: What do you want readers to take from this book?
Boyles: I hope it is as much fun to read Flora and Ozzie in cahoots as it was to write, and as a story of two fundamentally decent people who can’t help but break each other’s hearts, I hope the struggles in Fish and Maggie’s marriage resonate. But in terms of the novel as climate fiction, I believe that the worsening chaos and catastrophe of these large-scale ecological changes will eventually make water rights and food security and wealth inequality the subject of dinner table conversation for everyone, not just farmers or other people who manage the resources, and I hope the book can be part of the conversation about how we build a livable world.
SunLit: The importance of place has been a theme in your writing. Your protagonists in “Appraisals” live in an area of northern Colorado where agriculture and oil and gas operations often uncomfortably coexist. “They drill out here because we’re poor,” your character Ozzie says. How does that intersection of land use figure into the narrative?
Boyles: Ozzie, at 15, is only just beginning to scrutinize the familiar features of her life through the lens of environmental and social justice. It’s something I’ve always loved about teenagers, in literature and real-life—that they are so often truth tellers. They sometimes lack nuance, but they are willing to speak about political realities that adults are too complacent or uncomfortable to discuss.
Economically depressed areas and communities of color are disproportionately impacted by pollution and extraction operations, and Ozzie’s recognition of this fact puts her in direct conflict with her father, Fish, when he takes, and enjoys, a job in the industry. She is trying to figure out what makes a good person, and because she loves Fish, she is at once heartbroken and angry to discover that under her new definition, he might not be one. This emotional fallout between the characters is specific to the complexities of land and life in rural eastern Colorado.
SunLit: You’ve published short stories and now a novel. What’s next for you?
Boyles: I’m in the very early stages of a new novel set in southeastern Colorado that features the famous tarantulas of that region. I’ve also been a volunteer butterfly monitor for the past four years, and I’d love to write about community science as a balm for climate anxiety and grief.
A few more quick items
Currently on your nightstand for recreational reading: “The Oldest Bitch Alive” by Morgan Day
First book you remember really making an impression on you as a kid: I loved the Little House and Narnia books.
Best writing advice you’ve ever received: Finish the draft before you revise. I don’t always follow it, but it’s very smart.
Favorite fictional literary character: Olive Kittredge
Literary guilty pleasure (title or genre): I don’t feel guilty about it, but I love Deanna Raybourn’s Veronica Speedwell mystery series.
Digital, print or audio – favorite medium to consume literature: Print is still my favorite, but I listen to audiobooks on long runs.
One book you’ve read multiple times: “The Seed Keeper” by Diane Wilson
Other than writing utensils, one thing you must have within reach when you write: I am easily distracted, so things work best if it’s just me and the computer.
Best antidote for writer’s block: Word count targets.
Most valuable beta reader: My writing group, Meghan Pipe and Debbie Vance