An exploration of American ideas of utopia through the lens of one
millennial’s quest to live a more communal life under late-stage
capitalism
Told in a series of essays that balance memoir with fieldwork, Heaven
Is a Place on Earth 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 midtwenties—become his primary caretakers. The stress of
these new responsibilities, coupled with navigating America’s
broken health-care system and ordinary twenty-first-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 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.