Utopia is Not a Destination but an Ongoing Conversation

 

For as many generations as there have been utopian communities in the United States, there has also been a long and parallel history of utopian groupies—the people who so deeply desire to drop out and make the world anew, but who lack the specific convictions or staying power that might allow them to cleave to one community or another. The groupies are messier and more disorganized in their longings than the decisive utopians, who themselves have finished worrying or wondering and are already committed to their daily labors in bringing about paradise.
 
The groupies, on the other hand, are unclear about what they firmly believe, if not entirely lacking a comprehensive ethical system themselves. But their hopes are just as, if not more, utopian than the communities to whom they attach their curiosity, even if they—the groupies—are hard-pressed to commit to a program. Hope is their vocation. Their hoping, however shifting and sketchy, is endless.
 
They possess that defining feature of all proper groupies of any variety, an uncritical, ruthlessly naïve devotion, and it is from that depth at which this kind of endless hope can be felt at all. Like a crush, nourished in the shadows of your heart, the devotion does not necessarily seek completion or results. Utopian groupies are lovers of hope. It’s ideally an unselfish love, an erotic exchange that happens only to ensure that the utopian project continues to grow and flourish and inspire other people through this act of creative love. For utopian groupies, it’s not about eventually starting a community themselves, or even joining one, but about being a kind of accompaniment to what is already happening, which they did not start and which does not require their intervention. It’s an exchange that results in books, magazines, movies, many road trips.
 
Utopian groupies, like music groupies, are often road-bound, eventually road-weary. They are tied to no single place. They float from community to community, either in real life or as subjects of historical inquiry. They travel as a way to get by, as a coping mechanism, as a way to learn how other people are doing it or have done it, how others have created modes of collectivity, how others have fashioned a life outside of capitalism or have simply figured out creative ways to keep the overhead low together. They travel in order to figure out what they believe and how to live. I suppose I have joined these ranks.
 
 
Dreaming of some distant moment when I would no longer be a caretaker for my father-in-law, nor an itinerant adjunct, nor always longing for an elusive home, I’d started reading from a stack of books by some of these utopian groupies, about which I took lots of notes in no particular direction.
 
Paradise Now by Chris Jennings
In Utopia by J.C. Hallman
Cruising Utopia by José Esteban Muñoz
How We Get Free by the Combahee River Collective
Searching for Zion by Emily Raboteau
Utopia by Bernadette Mayer
The Hawthorn Archive: Letters from the Utopian Margins by Avery Gordon
The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris
The Modern Utopian, edited by Richard Fairfield
Utopia Drive by Erik Reece
 
Utopia owes a lot to its groupies, but what personal future was there in groupie-dom? Does being a groupie auger a kind of dreaming that eventually transmutes into something more, something of your own? The hopes for my own future lived largely in my mind, a kind of mainframe processing endless different calculations while I drove home from work on dark parkways piping New York City in my car, recently given to us by Sweeney’s grandmother before she’d passed away, thus replacing my 2 train commute. Every new idea could hold for about two or three mental moves, and then I’d hit a wall: Where would we work? Who else would be there? Where would Dan live? Where was the money? I could fantasize, get drunk, sit out late with an old friend on a porch and describe new ideas, sometimes get flurries of excitement that would hold over the course of an evening before petering out by morning.
 
I did other kinds of dreaming, though, in my sleep. For as long as I could remember, my dreams had often been set in big communal environments, populated by no fewer than a dozen or more familiar faces, as central characters to the story and action of the dream; friends and family members, somewhere on an ambiguous compound, a summer camp or a vaguely post-apocalyptic battle camp, a school building or hotel, some kind of large festive event like a wedding, a party, an abbey or a castle fortress with many different buildings and corridors, houses I had lived in blown up to fantastical size. My dreams, during this time, continued in this vein and started to host visitations from my three recently departed grandmothers.
 
 
I dreamt of each grandmother, one month after their respective deaths: in the dreams, they were almost dead, but not quite, and always each of them in a different living room of a different house, while other people rushed around busied with various tasks. I’d round the corner and then—“Oh my God, I thought you were dead!” No, they’d say, no, no. Almost laughing. Their eyes had sunken and purpled, like Fred Gwynne in Pet Sematary. They had messages: a confession for my mother to be transmitted via landline; a worry about my husband’s health; a dirty joke they’d wanted to tell me for years.
 
Before my first grandmother died, she sent Sweeney a letter. In it, she consoled him about his father who was in a coma at the time.
 
Six months later she died.
 
After her funeral, Sweeney’s grandmother sent me a letter. In it, she consoled me about my other grandmother who had just died.
 
One month later she died.
 
The third grandmother—my father-in-law’s mother—died without speaking or writing. She knew she was worried about Dan, but she couldn’t remember why.
 
Then, as I’ve said before, when Dan woke up from his coma, he could not speak or walk.
 
By all accounts he is still a young man. I walk him in his wheelchair down by the Bronx River. He points to his forehead in agony when he cannot begin or finish a sentence. A clause. A compound word. “Medical,” he says. “Scummy,” he says. “I’m fucked,” he says. He points to his forehead to indicate a physical blockage, a dam. The words are there, but no ladder, and the words beat against the dam until they go limp and die.
 
Before this, he was a defense lawyer, a storyteller, red-faced and laughing in the middle of a group of people. He told stories about the time when he beat the shit out of his ex-wife’s lover! The time he bicycled through the vampire town in Nevada! The time he caught a shark in Brazil! The time, during the great flood of 1972, he and his friends sailed down the Bronx River on an innertube! He told stories, and the room reorganized itself around him.
 
He’d often tell me, when I first met him, “I used to be a Republican, but now I’m an anarchist,” and he’d laugh, enjoying the shocking sound of it. His identity at that time was changing, though, as a newly divorced man. Money, security, and work had always been a huge source of stress and anxiety in his life, and he was beginning to toy with the idea of letting some of that go, not unlike the gray beard he had shaved off, revealing his very youthful face. Around this time, he began talking about this fantasy, quietly, of moving into a small rural trailer park community and living out his retirement there, dramatically different from the vision of retirement formed under the dual pressures of white Westchester upward mobility and doing right by his peasant Irish grandparents who’d gotten all the way here.
 
I often dream of him at night, rising from his wheelchair. Or tottering up a staircase. Or moving along a half-moon kitchen counter like a rookie at an ice-skating rink. In the dreams, I feel joy, though not surprise. Because in the dreams I knew he could do it all along, that it had only been a matter of him just standing up. In this soft dream light he looks at me, across the room. He opens his mouth. I hear it before it happens. Speech bubbles out of him in slow, clear streams.
 
I don’t know what he imagines, or dreams, is coming next now. In order to imagine a new world, you have to be kind of primed for it. You have to be dreaming of it already, so that you can recognize what you’re looking at when it comes. That’s where the groupie and the utopian distinction perhaps falls apart. One must, it seems, be a groupie first. One must be a lover of hope, a dreamer, a fool.
 
___________________________________
 
Excerpted from Heaven Is a Place On Earth: Searching for an American Utopia by Adrian Shirk.  2022.
 
How To Leave the World Behind: On the Dreams of Utopian Groupies.  Adrian Shirk Considers the Perpetual American Desire for Better Worlds. By Adrian Shirk. LitHub, March 14, 2022.

“As soon as I start relying on the word ‘utopia’ it becomes a misnomer,” writes Adrian Shirk in the opening pages of Heaven Is a Place on Earth: Searching for an American Utopia. Through a blend of memoir and fieldwork, Shirk examines dozens of communities, experiments, and gestures born from a collective desire to make a better world in response to the ravages of empire and capitalism. Meanwhile, we read about Shirk’s personal quest to find a home of her own, all while trying to endure the American healthcare system and the precarious academic labor market.

 
Heaven Is a Place on Earth is Shirk’s second book. It follows her fascinating exploration of American women mystics and prophets in 2017’s And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy, named a best book of the year by NPR. Shirk is the founder of the Mutual Aid Society, a cooperative residency in the Catskills Mountains that demonstrates an alternative to the isolating, rent-burdened conditions in which many artists and writers struggle to carve out a creative life.
 
As our expert guide to American utopias, Shirk upends familiar narratives about 19th-century Protestant communities and the back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s. She reflects on the Short Mountain Sanctuary in Tennessee, a site created by the Radical Faeries that became a refuge for many gay men during the most harrowing years of the HIV/AIDS crisis. She calls for a reckoning with the horrifying violence committed against MOVE, the Black liberation Anarcho-Christian movement that the Philadelphia Police Department bombed in 1985. Shirk confronts the long shadow of the carceral state as she visits the sites of historic utopian communities, from the Groveland Shaker Village to Black Mountain College, only to find herself gazing at prisons established in the intervening years. We spoke over Zoom about her approach to writing nonfiction prose, her research methods, and how thinking like a utopian can bring value to our lives.
 
How did you come to write this book?
 
I would say, in short, it was a response to a particularly catalyzing traumatic life circumstance, and also a response to enduring areas of passion and interest.
 
I’ve been interested in the ways that people have been remaking the world as a subject matter for many years. Then, in my mid-twenties, I became a caretaker to my then-father-in-law, who had suffered a series of debilitating strokes. I entered five years of a very intense yet in a lot of ways ordinary American experience. I was trying to survive, make enough money to get by, and take care of someone in the failing healthcare system of a disinvested state.
 
As a response to that experience, I started keeping notes about various kinds of communities of refusal or rogue movements throughout US history that had responded to social and economic precarity in ways that I found interesting. It was a balm for me to keep this very informal, ongoing record. I began to realize that I was writing a book. This is my usual experience of writing a book: books subsume whatever questions or crisis I’m currently navigating, in a way where the personal is a cipher to make contact with a much broader lineage.
 
At the beginning of Heaven Is a Place on Earth, you write about having had the expectation that you would one day shape your notes into a tidily packaged commercial nonfiction book. Could you talk about where those expectations came from, and how you released them to create this book?
 
I’ve often felt caught between others’ and my own expectations of what it means to write prose. Those expectations are that, when I am writing prose, I have something to say, and I am in command, and I know what I want to say as I’m composing sentences. Then there’s this other reality, which is that I write prose in the way a poet composes or a painter paints, in that I don’t begin by knowing.
 
My actual experience of working with text is that it’s a medium I manipulate and listen to, seeking rhythms and images and music until something emerges that I like or think is interesting. It’s through this that I move to the next stepping stone. This is a generative process for me.
 
I was often working with material such as historical scholarship or field reporting, which have a lot of conventions around how we use it and engage with it. I often felt like I had a responsibility to explain myself. On the other hand, I’m not a historian. I’m not a reporter. I’m not a journalist. I’m a weird, you know, autobio-poet-thinker who composes something that looks rational, but is actually the result of a deeply non-rational composition process.
 
Somewhere through the process, I had to look at what I had written and accept the kind of particular witness I could provide to this subject, which has been written about by a lot of people in a lot of different ways. And at a certain point that became a real pleasure, rather than a kind of anxiety about what the book wasn’t.
 
As part of your field work, you visited a number of utopian communities. Your experiences ranged from assembling wooden truck sets in the toy factory of the Fox Hill Bruderhof intentional community to stocking the pantry of Simple Way in North Philadelphia with food that would otherwise have been tossed by a local grocery chain. How did you get permission to visit these communities?
 
What helped me is a couple things. Firstly, I take it for granted that people in general appreciate other people being genuinely curious about them, their lives, or their communities. Reaching out to people and expressing a genuine, complex interest is, most of the time, positively responded to. You may think that the people you admire or think are interesting hear from people all the time, but 99 percent of the time, that has never happened.
 
The other thing is, it required that my interest was super genuine. And by genuine, what I mean is this: I had to often indicate that I was not a journalist, I was not a scholar. I did not have a thesis I was trying to prove in an overt way, and I was not trying to get a scoop. I was transparent that it wasn’t my desire to prove how weird or great anyone was, but to inhabit and appreciate people’s wild worldviews and theologies in a way that is complicated.
 
In Heaven Is a Place on Earth, you sing beautifully to the Bronx. What did you learn about the history of the Mid-Bronx Desperadoes, the Banana Kelly Community Improvement Association, and the grassroots movement that rebuilt the borough?
 
When I look at the Northwest Bronx, where I used to live, I think about this community of people who effectively rebuilt the Bronx through direct community action from the 1970s onward after the city basically lit the Bronx on fire and left it. The city divested everything from the Bronx, like trash pickup and sewage maintenance, in a coordinated abandonment during the seventies and eighties.
 
But the Bronx today is very much alive and standing. And that’s because there was a coordinated movement that happened in the seventies, eighties, and nineties to rebuild the Bronx. People created Mutual Aid Networks and rebuilt the buildings. People inside the communities created their own daycares and schools, and fixed their own civic plumbing. There was this truly extraordinary rebirth of an entire borough by the people living inside it.
 
I looked at the Bronx rebuilding movement as a utopian experiment of doing something that was not supposed to happen under the rules of capital and conquest, and did anyway. It was an awakening for me to say: What are all the things that we label as something other than utopian experiment? What happens if we create this much larger definition of what gets to be included?
 
One of my intentions is to take the word “utopian,” a pejorative adjective that’s used to mean something that’s impossible or foolhearted or naive or so fantastical as to not be worth dreaming about, and to carve out a space where that word could be a place of building and searching and dreaming and thinking beyond the tools that are given to us. It feels like a place of freedom, a site of being able to think about ideas of freedom.
 
Tell me about the role of the Mutual Aid Society in Heaven Is a Place on Earth.
 
At the beginning of the book, I had very pressing personal questions. How can our lives be less stupid day to day? How can they be less relentlessly exhausting and extractive and unremunerated? At that time in my life, this felt impossible.
 
At a certain point, my father-in-law became a little more independent and could access a larger system of care. My then-husband and I were able to begin to think about other possibilities. I was friends with artists, low-wage workers, adjuncts—people whose labor was never going to be remunerated any more than it was. So I thought: If that’s the case, how do we make the overhead lower in the coolest way possible, given the resources?
 
One of many answers was the possibility of cooperatively buying a place to live. We ended up buying a farmhouse with an additional studio workspace on a large piece of forest in Delaware County and turning it into a cooperative artist residency.
 
The Mutual Aid Society, which we named in an affectionate nod to Peter Kropotkin’s 1902 anarchist biology treatise Mutual Aid: A Factory of Evolution, ended up becoming many different things. There was a time when it was marshaled into a sustained response to the pandemic.
 
Right now, there’s about eight cooperators. And it’s also my home. I think what I’ve learned is to actually not anticipate too strictly what it is, or what it will be, but to be sensitive to what it needs to be.
 
How can I and as many people as possible have access to something that would be really expensive and difficult to obtain if we were all doing it individually? How can all of our overheads be lower because of it, or even just a little bit lower? What kind of life do we get to live? What kind of relationships do we get to have with our friends, partners, children, communities, and our art? That’s an open inquiry. But it has been astonishing to watch the answers to those questions emerge for so many people over the last three years.
 
In Search of Utopia: A Conversation with Adrian Shirk. By Hannah Maureen Holden.Columbia Journal, March 14, 2022. 

Told in a series of essays that balance memoir with fieldwork, Heaven Is a Place on Earth (Counterpoint) is an idiosyncratic study of American utopian experiments — from the Shakers to the radical faerie communes of Short Mountain to the Bronx rebuilding movement — through the lens of one woman’s quest to create a more communal life in a time of unending economic and social precarity. When Adrian Shirk’s father-in-law has a stroke and loses his ability to speak and walk, she and her husband — both adjuncts in their mid-twenties — become his primary caretakers. The stress of these new responsibilities, coupled with navigating America’s broken health-care system and ordinary 21st-century financial insecurity, propels Shirk into an odyssey through the history and present of American utopian experiments in the hope that they might offer a way forward. Along the way, Shirk, author of And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy, seeks solace in her own community of friends, artists, and theologians. They try to imagine a different kind of life, examining what might be replicable within the histories of utopia-making, and what might be doomed. Rather than “no place,” Shirk reframes utopia as something that, according to the laws of capital and conquest, shouldn’t be able to exist — but does anyway, if only for a moment. Shirk was joined in conversation by Ariel Gore, author of We Were Witches and Hexing the Patriarchy.
 
 Adrian Shirk presents Heaven Is a Place on Earth in conversation with Ariel Gore.
Powell’s Books, March 22, 2022. 

Adrian Shirk is the author of And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy, a study of American female mystics and prophets, named an NPR Best Book of 2017. Her second work of nonfiction, Heaven Is a Place on Earth (Counterpoint, $26; reviewed in this issue), is an exploration of American utopian experiments, from the Shakers to the radical faerie communes of Short Mountain to the Bronx rebuilding movement. She teaches in Pratt Institute's BFA Creative Writing Program and lives at the Mutual Aid Society in the Catskill mountains.

 Throughout the book, you wrestle with the contradiction that nowhere perfect exists, yet people keep trying to create ideal communities. Is the attempt the important thing?

 AS : Perfection is only the dream from which the utopian attempt issues. Utopianism is about enacting immediate change, rather than reform--some kind of direct action that interrupts the life required by a violent empire. A noble failure is the greatest achievement, perhaps, given that longevity often leads to the accumulation of wealth and power in a way that will ultimately corrupt what might have been prophetic or paradigm-shifting about the utopian experiment to begin with.

 And the utopian "escape" can and has often been paired with engagement with the world's problems--in fact, utopianism really is an engagement with the world in a deep way; the very impulse to dream of a utopian alternative is a direct response to the conditions of an unjust empire. There would be no need to "escape" otherwise, or architect alternatives.

 At one point you say, "utopia is never far from its opposite." Dystopian novels are as popular as ever. To what extent do you think real-life utopias and fictional dystopias have the same aims?

 AS : I think real-life utopian experiments and fictional dystopias both offer warnings about the dangers of relying too much on ideology, and not enough on living, or choosing the person over the belief. So, in that way, real utopian experiments and fictional dystopian narratives are two sides of the same coin: a dystopia is a utopia that lost sight of--or never included--understanding itself as resistance to a violent empire, and thus starts to look like a violent empire itself.

 Where you grew up in Oregon, the population is nearly three-quarters white, a legacy of Black exclusion policies from the 1850s onward. What are your concerns about the class and homogeneity implications of utopian experiments?

 AS : Oregon came into focus for me because of the way that the 19th-century white settlers there explicitly articulated a plan to create an all-white paradise. They really believed that it was a benevolent and public good, and that their lack of participation in chattel slavery and the Civil War was evidence of their good intentions. So that's perhaps among the worst-case scenarios.

 If the pursuit of utopia is in some way about a rejection of the terms you've been asked to live under in your particular society or culture, and the innovation of an immediate alternative, then we quickly find ourselves asking: Who among us has the time, space, energy, money and access to engage in the risk of such an alternative? Even if said "utopian experiment" isn't some pastoral exit to a rural commune but perhaps, simply, the local volunteer-run women's shelter they want to contribute to or the food co-op they'd like to join in exchange for a weekly work shift.

 And I guess that's why it was important to me to really broaden the scope of "utopia" as a descriptive category in the book: Where do we see evidence of utopian activity in our immediate surroundings, and how can we orient ourselves toward it, if we want to? Over time, I became more curious about communities or movements that perhaps hadn't achieved some perfect stasis or solution, but who had, as a primary tenet of their project, centered and maintained active concerns about homogeneity.

 Intentional communities can be more environmentally sustainable because of the back-to-the-land philosophy and efforts at food and energy self-sufficiency. Can you imagine this model becoming more popular as we move away from fossil fuels?

 AS : Absolutely--and it already is. The Foundation of Intentional Communities reported in 2019 that, in the last decade, the United States alone has seen an increase of approximately 100,000 people who have moved into cooperative living arrangements, largely for reasons to do with ecological sustainability, as well as financial and material sustainability. That's distinct from, say, the mid-20th-century surge in communal living that was more shaped by ideological and political motives. There's something particular about communitarian upticks in moments of material emergency.

 A few years ago, with your husband and friends, you set up a communal living project in the Catskills, the Mutual Aid Society. How does it compare, so far, with sites you visit in the book?

 AS : I knew that my desire to perform this research was related to a real, practical inquiry about how to actually transform our lives. The magical thing about book-writing and art-making in general is that it really does change your life in literal ways.

 How does it compare? Gosh, I don't know. It arrived from similar questions: If we bought a house and some land for cheap, in driving distance from New York City, how could we mobilize it to make it a collective resource for others, and in doing so lower the overhead for things that would be impossible or too expensive for us and any of these people to do individually?

 First, we ran it as an informal artist residency and soul retreat for people at request. Then, during Covid, it became an emergency boarding house and space of relief for folks participating in protests in the movement for Black lives, as well as a laboratory for new enterprises for folks who were temporarily unemployed. Now it's more of a cooperative artist's residency, something like a shared resource for an extensive network of collaborators. It is also my home.

 We keep the organizing principles pretty practical, rather than ideological; there's a lot of shared labor, but it's not that organized; there have developed lots of rituals and holidays specific to the life of this place; and I've watched people make extraordinary things that they otherwise might not have. I've seen lives change. We've also suffered enormous loss, heartbreak and failure.

 I hesitate to describe anything too pointedly because it is always changing. And that's a principle I gleaned from my research: nurture change, let go of authorial intent, choose the person not the idea, but make sure that at any moment that basic goal is being met: to have, through collectivity, a more luxurious and creative life for a lower overhead than we had before.

 I was struck by the line "All books are written backward." Covid and caring for your disabled father-in-law were unexpected factors as you researched and traveled. How did the finished book differ from the one you'd intended to write?

 AS : What a great question. When I began the book years ago, I dreamed, I think, that I would finally stop writing weird hybrid messy narrative nonfiction and instead produce a really focused and tight pop-nonfiction book about this history. As always, there is so much I could add.

 I started the book thinking that I was writing my way into one kind of story about my life--one where I would go on this wild research journey, marinate in my findings, tell people thrilling things about all that might be possible, stay married to my husband forever, have children, buy a house that we attempt to use in this cooperative way, but likely it falls away and we get subsumed into the very thing I was decrying.

 I really thought that's where the journey of the book was going to take me. Instead, it took me somewhere way weirder, way cooler, way messier, and so the book, too, is weirder, cooler, messier, more surprising, more beguiling, more adventurous than I ever thought it could be.

 The Writer's Life :  Adrian Shirk: American Utopias, Past and Present. By  Rebecca Foster.  Shelf Awareness, March 22, 2022. 

When Thomas More wrote Utopia in the 16th century, he ensured that all those who would seek out a perfect society, inspired by his book, would have to answer for the literal Greek meaning of its title: “no place.” So, has there ever been a utopia? It depends on whom you ask. Adrian Shirk, who joined Smarty Pants several years ago to talk about her previous book, takes utopia to mean communities that “have intentionally understood themselves as world-building a way out of a death-dealing system, in the service of making, if only briefly, some idea of heaven on earth—not just for themselves, but however foolhardy, for all of humankind.” From that definition—and from the bop by Belinda Carlisle, of course—comes the title of her new book, Heaven Is a Place on Earth, an exploration of moments and movements in American utopianism then, today, and tomorrow, from the Shakers to the rebuilding of the Bronx to a Waffle House by the side of the road.

 No Place Is Perfect:  Adrian Shirk on the search for American utopia.  Stephanie Bastek talks with Adrian Shirk.  Smarty Pants, April 1, 2022.  The American Scholar.

In May of 2021—in what I thought, naively, might be the waning days of the pandemic—I moved out of a three-bedroom apartment, where I’d been living with Craigslist roommates for the last six years, and into a house. My friend Sarah, also single and in her mid-thirties, was joining me there; our friend Maurene, her husband, and their baby would be our next-door neighbors. Immediately, the adults did what all modern adults do when we know we’ll need to get ahold of one another regularly: we started a group chat, which we jokingly named The Commune.

 Of course, what were doing was hardly communal living in any radical or interesting sense. Almost everyone has neighbors, and if you’re lucky, you can depend on them for small things: picking up the mail when you’re out of town, the exchange of local gossip, lending the proverbial cup of sugar. We hoped to take it just a bit further than that. Sarah, Maurene, and I are all writers, which means we work in an industry with no clear career path or metrics for success. Before this, we’d been relying on each other for years for company, for gut-checks, for introductions and edits, so there was already a sense that we were in it—whatever “it” was at any given moment—together.

 There are no formal agreements in place, but certain rhythms have developed between us. We give each other rides when we’re going to the same place; we lend each other eggs and milk, borrow drill bits, books, and even sometimes wifi. When Maurene has a hard day with the baby, her husband sends her over to us, and we pour her wine and let her talk about something other than being a mother for a little while. In return, I have showed up in her living room after difficult days at my desk to press the baby’s small body to mine, marveling at how much simpler things are when all I have to do is sit on the rug and focus on playing with him.

 It’s the smallest thing, having one friend live one house over. But it is shocking how much that small thing helps, especially after the isolation of the last two years—most especially if you were single during that period.

 I had been living in the new house for about six months when I picked up an early copy of Adrian Shirk’s latest, a difficult-to-categorize piece of nonfiction called Heaven is a Place on Earth: Searching for an American Utopia. I had interviewed Shirk when her first book, And Your Daughters Shall Prophecy, was released in 2016, so I already knew we shared something of a sensibility about history, about feminism, about what makes for an interesting kind of life. I was curious to see what she had to say about intentional communal living, a subject my friends and I gesture at often—the way I think a lot of people do, saying vaguely that we’d like to do The Commune but bigger, buy a compound or something, a place where we could ride out our golden years together, wouldn’t that be nice—but then never move to actually, practically attempt.

 The book is true to its subtitle: it is about the act of seeking, not necessarily finding, of patching and piecing together history and criticism and experience and desire into something much shaggier than narrative, but also much truer to life. This makes sense, given the way Shirk thinks about kind of utopia she’s interested in pursuing. Thomas More originally coined the term in his 1516 book of the same name, and it literally translates to “no place,” which is how we often view attempts at utopia, Shirk writes: as pie-in-the-sky dreams, “too perfect to actually exist.” She argues against that reading, though, suggesting that instead, “utopia is something that, according to the laws of capital and conquest, was never supposed to be able to exist, but somehow did, for a blip in time.”

 Just because none of the utopian experiments of the past created a stable, permanent heaven on earth doesn’t mean that they were failures, or should be written off as naïve hippie fantasies, she writes. Instead, we might more usefully frame them as resistance projects, a form of active wrestling with the conditions one finds oneself in, whatever they might be. Utopia is not a destination but a conversation, ongoing. It’s the work of attempting to continually reimagine what might be possible outside existing frameworks for society, community, and family. “How can I live a life… in the United States today, which is not primarily organized around private property and the acquisition of personal wealth?” Shirk asks in the book’s introduction.

 This is, of course, a moment in which many of our national frameworks are already breaking or broken. According to the Health Resources and Services Administration, Americans were experiencing a “loneliness epidemic” even before Covid; two years of isolation and fear have only exacerbated the issue. We’re witnessing the mass exodus of women from the workforce, spurred in large part by the lack of childcare infrastructure in this country, and a Great Resignation of workers of all genders leaving jobs for a diverse array of reasons. Wealth inequality continues to create a gap between the unimaginably rich and the rest of us. Climate change is slowly rendering even the weather’s patterns foreign and unpredictable. What better time could there be to ask ourselves what’s working and what isn’t? What better time could there be to try to build something thoughtful and new?

 Heaven is a Place on Earth was originally conceived as a survey of American intentional living experiments, Shirk writes, and though it evolved away from that format, it does offer a good overview of the breadth of forms that utopian seeking has taken in this country. That overview includes utopian projects that don’t look like what we might traditionally picture when someone says commune: Shirk visits places like Mount Lebanon’s Shaker Community, but also writes about the Bronx rebuilding movement of the 80s and the Adjunct Flophouse she and some friends organized, a rented space where adjunct professors could live cheaply while visiting New York City to work. These, too, are utopias in her eyes, even though they don’t look like what most Americans imagine as communal living (mainly, pious white people eating lentils and talking about chakras, plus or minus some weird sex stuff).

 These urban experiments feel particularly close to my own heart. I was born and raised in Los Angeles, and as much as I like the idea of communal living, I’ve always had trouble picturing myself on a rural homestead, milking dairy cows when the sun comes up. I spent some time around the sustainable agriculture community in and after college, and mostly what I learned is that I’m not cut out for farming; whatever utopia I find will likely involve some measure of asphalt and takeout and neighbors who are strangers, as well as neighbors who are friends.

 And in fact, the closest I’ve come to heaven lately was engaging in my own attempts at urban renewal, volunteering as part of Mutual Aid LA for a project called Produce in the Park. Beginning in the spring of 2020, when I spent most of my time shut up in my bedroom or else walking long, lonely laps around my neighborhood, I started showing up at a warehouse in the City of Industry on Thursday mornings. There, a carefully-masked group of us would load pallets of food—slightly moldy green beans, past-expiration kale, perfectly fine raspberries and blueberries, sometimes whole pineapples—into our cars, and take it to a local park, where we would cull, sort, divide and bag it up before sending it off to various community fridges.

 The volunteers formed a community, of course; we got to know one another as we sat in the grass, pulling dead leaves off Brussels sprouts or deciding which onions were too slimy to be edible. But there were other people in the park too, and they became part of what we were doing as well. Some just stopped by to chat; some lent a hand; some picked up bags for themselves and their neighbors. After a few months, folks knew our schedule, and by the time we pulled up they’d be waiting in line with metal pull-carts, waiting patiently for the week’s assortment of fresh produce.

 It should not have existed. It should not have had to exist. In a just world, food waste would be redistributed by something other than a network of unpaid and untrained volunteers; in a just world, there wouldn’t be so many hungry people in need in the first place. But and also, in those moments, as we pushed together past the world as it was to the world we wanted to live in, we found ourselves in a kind of heaven.

 It was heaven for me to get to practice my rusty Spanish, to learn the dietary restrictions and preferences of the people who came back each week, to have grandmothers advise me on their favorite recipes, or that rich people got sick because they didn’t eat enough rice and beans, that rice and beans would save my life. It was heaven to sweat under the big blue sky and talk and dance to the music that someone started bringing to play on speakers while we worked. It was heaven to care for, and be cared for, and be in my body and nowhere else. I went home after each session tired and too hot and talked out. And it was the best memory of that time, easily: the sense that we were all blowing a soap bubble, those mornings in the park, something fragile and temporary but above all hopeful.

 I’ve been seeking more of the same ever since.

 I grew up with parents who had lived on communes of varying types and degrees of seriousness, so I am aware that they have their pitfalls. My mother occupied a few small-scale communal houses in her twenties, mostly populated by fellow USC grads; my father was, for a time, part of the Hog Farm, an ongoing experiment which is briefly name-checked in Heaven is a Place on Earth. They ultimately abandoned these places for more normative lives, in part over issues Shirk describes as endemic to the communal living experiment, the things that usually dismantle all manner of communes: “compromising aims, getting bogged down by maintenance labor, figuring out how to decide if so-and-so can keep their shed rotting or isn’t helping to clean up the kitchen, and how to talk to them about it…”

 Which is precisely why I loved Shirk’s book so much: its expansive, sometimes rambling structure feels less like being lectured on best practices and more like having a long conversation with your most interesting, well-read friend about what to try to build next. Reading it made me move the borders of my mind, if only a little: to try to see out of the corners of my eyes, past what I expect to what might be possible if I looked at my life from another angle, tried something different for once. It gave me language for things I had thought only abstractly or opaquely. It made me feel, fundamentally, intellectually and spiritually less alone.

 I do not live in a commune now, and I may never. I would like very much to keep pushing towards something like it, though: gathering friends on blocks and in neighborhoods. Doing Mutual Aid and other organizing work in the hope that someday, no one will need to wait in line for a bag of produce they couldn’t otherwise access. Contributing in whatever ways I can to a communal pool of resources, giving what I have, and learning how to accept help when I need it.

 At one point in the book, Shirk writes about visiting her cousin Eleanor’s farm. Eleanor and her husband and Shirk and her husband stay up late talking by the fire. “Eleanor looking at me over the fire and laughing, asking if this is utopia, and I say, yes, why not,” Shirk writes, “I mean yes, anything that offers something other than capital and death.”

 I carry that phrase around with me now, as I try to inscribe myself into a future that feels less limited than the present I occupy. Anything that offers something more than capital and death, I think, picking up the baby, pouring a glass of wine, wondering who else could make use of my privilege and my time. Life lived in a series of moments, as an experiment, an exercise, an offering: building something that can’t last, and laughing when it falls down, and then trying again.

 My life braided with others’, and mattering more because of it. Making meaning outside of accomplishment or earning, so that I’m rooted in nothing more or less than the land and in my loved ones: yes, that sounds right to me. Something more than capital or death, is what I want for my life. Hear, hear, I find myself thinking. That’s what I want, and that’s where I want it: heaven on earth, here, here.

 Finding Utopias Where We Can: On Hopeful Living as Resistance.  Zan Romanoff Reads Adrian Shirk’s Heaven is a Place on Earth. By Zan Romanoff. LitHub, April 4, 2022.

A common story is told about idealistic city dwellers who move to rural areas like the Catskills. Over the centuries, rural New York state has played host to utopian groups seeking out new, radically communal ways of life. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, groups like the Shakers and the Fourierists founded communities in Western New York. Later, in the Catskills, Buddhist monasteries were built and artists’ colonies like Byrdcliffe cropped up. In America, the quest for radical community—whether driven by religion, politics, or a desire to make art—has often been depicted as requiring a literal journey: a move from the city to the country, where it’s possible to build something new and start over.
 
This is broadly the story Adrian Shirk tells in her new book, Heaven is a Place on Earth: Searching for an American Utopia. A talented researcher and a sympathetic chronicler of intentional communities, Shirk visits a Bruderhof community in the foothills of the Catskills, where she finds men and women who dress like Mennonites, sing German folk songs, and support their “shared-purse economy” by manufacturing wooden toys and publishing books on theology. She tells of Father Divine and his Peace Mission Movement, which began in Harlem and then, during the Great Depression, spread upstate, where racially integrated “heavens” clustered around farms producing much-needed food. She relates the history of the Gate Hill Cooperative, an artists’ colony founded near Nyack, New York, in 1954 by a group of former Black Mountain College faculty that included John Cage and Merce Cunningham.
 
Yet Shirk’s book isn’t just a study of groups that have historically decamped to rural America with plans for a brave new world. Heaven is a Place on Earth is also a memoir, in which Shirk records her own search for a more communal life. When she starts her own utopian experiment, moving to upstate New York and buying a house in the Catskills—down the road from Delhi, New York, the small town where I grew up—the book becomes, unintentionally, a window into rural gentrification: the migration of affluent urbanites and suburbanites to the country. That she doesn’t see her move in these terms, at a time when second-home buyers have spurred a “freak-out housing market” in upstate New York, only highlights just how under-recognized rural gentrification is.
 
Shirk grew up in Portland, Oregon, and spent her college years in Brooklyn, where her interest in communal living began. Like many middle-class Americans, Shirk experienced college as a place of freedom and discovery, where “one could live in a close community and see each other regularly and organically.” Unlike most college students, Shirk and her friends founded a small press, took in “strays and travelers,” and hosted a biweekly reading. After college, Shirk was distressed to find herself socially isolated, with “wage-earning” at the center of her life. What Shirk is “questing after,” she writes, is “to not have to work as much, not have to have a career, and to be around people I like more often, and more easily.”
 
Rural living is not, however, her first choice. Midway through the book, she’s been dreaming of moving upstate, but when asked to imagine her “ideal commune,” she decides she doesn’t “need a view, or a mountain, or access to ‘nature’” and imagines instead a “cooperatively owned apartment building” in an outer borough. There’s only one problem with this scenario, Shirk admits: She and her friends would be “gentrifying a neighborhood”—or, if they bought somewhere more expensive, they’d “have to work waged labor all the time just to make their commune run.” This, it seems, is the logic that leads Shirk upstate: It’ll be more affordable than Brooklyn or the Bronx, and it won’t count as gentrification.
 
Why wouldn’t it count? When we talk about gentrification, we tend to talk about cities: New York, San Francisco, New Orleans. These are a few of the places examined by journalist P.E. Moskowitz in their 2017 book How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood. “There seemed to be two worlds living on top of each other,” Moskowitz writes of New York City. “A set of stores, bars, and restaurants visited by me and my friends, and a set visited by the residents there before us.” But gentrification also happens in the country. In fact, Moskowitz’s image of “two worlds” describes perfectly what has happened in Delhi, a village of approximately 3,000 people that was once a farming community. Across the street from Tractor Supply, you can now buy a handmade lamp for more than $1,000. Next door to Dubben Brothers Hardware, you can buy a vintage rug for $2,500. At Bushel—a “collective dedicated to art, agriculture, ecology, and action”—a recent pop-up salon offered $125 haircuts, across the street from Cut Loose, where a haircut costs $15.
 
On some level, Shirk seems aware that migrating upstate might count as gentrification, but she takes pains not to fully acknowledge this fact. In a brief history of the Catskills, she notes that the region has “been continuously under gentry speculation in lifestyle and travel rags from the nineteenth century to today,” framing the issue as a historical fact—even an inevitability. Shirk notes that The New York Times has declared that the Catskills are having a “comeback” with “aging millennial hipsters”—“among whom,” Shirk writes, “I suppose we were counted.” Then the paragraph ends. Shirk counts herself, perhaps noting the irony, as one of these hipsters, but she does not consider what the effects of this hipster migration might be.
 
Once she’s upstate, she fails to see the two worlds in the Catskills. This seems self-protective: If she acknowledged them, she would have to reckon with her own decision. When Shirk visits Main Street in Delhi, she highlights Bushel—the nonprofit with the $125 haircuts—and dutifully quotes its mission statement about “growing community,” but doesn’t mention the high-end businesses down the block. Later, Shirk grabs drinks in Hobart at the “Bull & Garland pub,” which is not, as readers might assume, a bare-bones local spot—that would be the Dinner Plate, across the street, which serves potato skins, chicken tenders, and jalapeno poppers. The Bull & Garland is owned by British expats and serves duck confit. (Read more about it in Forbes, Vogue, and Time Out New York.)
 
When Shirk visits the “1860s farmhouse” that she and her husband will eventually purchase, she reveals the house’s price only after listing amenities: five bedrooms, “sixty-four acres of hardwood forest and fallow dairy pasture and apple orchards,” two spring-fed ponds, a two-story garage with potential for an apartment. How much, for all this? “Two hundred eighty-two thousand dollars,” Shirk writes. Appearing, as it does, at the end of a paragraph, the price seems intended to floor us: What a deal, the reader is supposed to be thinking. What Shirk doesn’t say is that the price only seems like a deal if you’re coming from New York City. In Delaware County, where Shirk looks at real estate, the median per-capita income is a little less than $28,000. To Shirk—and to many of her readers—$282,000 might seem like a steal. To the family of four who live down the road from Shirk’s compound, on $50,000 a year, the price might seem criminal. Shirk doesn’t reflect on what the existence of the second-home market might mean or how rising housing prices might impact working-class locals.
 
When Shirk tours the house, she makes sure to tell us she’s buying from a second-home owner, a “retired Ford engineer.” Why mention this? Perhaps because it exonerates Shirk from gentrification’s cardinal sin: If she buys from a second-home owner, she won’t have displaced anybody directly. Buying from a second-home owner has other benefits, too. The house has been “lovingly and expertly cared for,” and Shirk admires the “wild meadow and forest land, left to do its own thing.” The engineer and his wife, Shirk reports approvingly, “saw [themselves] as stewards of a kind of land preserve.” And sure, this is admirable. But treating your 64 acres like a nature preserve is also its own kind of privilege, available only to those who don’t need the land to make their living. Shirk doesn’t pause on this or on the run-down farms and ranch houses and trailer parks in Delaware County, although many exist. When she hikes to the highest point of her soon-to-be property and savors the view, she reminds herself that “apprehending and idolizing a view relates to imperialism, manifest destiny, power, conquest.” Shirk interrupts her reverie to ruminate on abstractions, but she doesn’t grapple with the fact that, among the “leafy hills and peaks” she looks out on, there are many houses in worse shape than the former second home she’s preparing to purchase, and that there are people living in them.
 
Ultimately, it’s this blind spot—Shirk’s inability to see locals—that most troubles me. When Shirk conducts fieldwork, visiting The Farm in Tennessee or Black Mountain College in North Carolina, she talks to people and learns about these communities. In Delaware County, locals rarely warrant attention. Her neighbors make a brief, instrumental appearance: They tell Shirk the “entire and complete history” of her house. Otherwise, Shirk hangs out with a poet who lives in a “huge Victorian home” that is “gorgeous and simple.” Or Shirk invites up friends from the city—a professor on sabbatical, a producer for This American Life.
 
This depiction of Delaware County as a place that contains only urbanites is something Shirk’s book has in common with lifestyle writing on the Catskills, which appears, like clockwork, in the Travel and Real Estate sections of The New York Times. In older articles—say, “Vintage Homes and Postcard Panoramas,” from 2009—this blind spot is near absolute. Readers meet Lawrence Lewis, “Manhattan gemologist”; Zonder Kennedy, “a professional guitarist from Manhattan”; and the “designers, professors, musicians and doctors” who are renovating historic houses, “making up for decades of neglect.” It’s in this final clause that the locals appear, their presence only implied: tasteless simpletons who don’t appreciate “wide-plank floors, pocket doors, and eyebrow moldings” and have let the town’s “vintage homes” fall apart. In Times pieces written after the rise of Trump, the specter of the “white working class” is often present, but only superficially. A 2019 article on the “comeback” of the Catskills ends with a brief mention of the “socioeconomic divide” between locals and weekenders. “It’s still very poor,” says Victoria Wilson, a second-home owner, a senior editor at Knopf, and apparently the best source on rural poverty that the author could find.
 
These blind spots matter because they stifle an important conversation before it can start. Rural gentrification has consequences, and we should be talking about them. In the recent book Pushed Out: Contested Development and Rural Gentrification in the US West, the sociologist Ryanne Pilgeram highlights two negative effects: Rising housing prices push some residents out, and the residents who remain are increasingly surrounded by stores and services they cannot afford to access. To understand the changes in Dover, Idaho, her hometown, Pilgeram applies the concept of “amenity migration.” Retirees move to Dover for certain amenities—mountain views, recreational opportunities. Once amenity migrants arrive, more amenities pop up that cater to newcomers. Pilgeram articulates how these new amenities—even those that are purportedly public—can also exclude: In Dover, new bike trails are built, but most “old-timers” don’t cycle; slips at the new marina cost $1,000 per season, more than many locals can afford. The new housing development doesn’t have gates, but “the restructuring of space along class divisions has created its own kinds of gates and walls,” Pilgeram writes.
 
Writers like Shirk who take part in amenity migration should acknowledge these class divisions. Which isn’t to say acknowledgment is an end point: If Shirk had slotted in “rural gentrification” alongside “imperialism” in her litany at the top of the hill, this would have been something, but not much. To paraphrase Katy Waldman’s critique of self-awareness in contemporary fiction, awareness doesn’t equal atonement. But awareness is a first step. Only once we’re aware of rural gentrification can we talk about its effects and consider how to bridge the two worlds in the Catskills and areas like it.
 
We Need to Talk About Rural Gentrification.  While city dwellers find “deals” on real estate in the country, locals are priced out. By Ben Sandham. The New Republic, April 26, 2022.