In Search of Utopia: A Conversation with Adrian Shirk
By Hannah Maureen Holden
“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.
About the author:
Hannah Maureen Holden is a New York City-based writer, editor, and alumna of the MFA Fiction program at Columbia University. She served as the online fiction editor of Columbia Journal from May 2021–June 2022.
