[Heaven]

What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “[Heaven]”?

I started writing [Heaven] about an hour before sunset* on a small concrete patio outside my hut at a beach camp in Sinai, Egypt. It was late April, and I had just crossed the Red Sea from Jordan, where I was attending a film festival in Wadi Rum—an otherworldly desert valley furnished with red sand and massive sandstone mountains. What ideal writing conditions, right? Well, as I was two-thirds of the way through the draft—the sky almost completely sunless now—a friend and her two kids joined me outside the hut, and excitedly described the day’s excursion to a nearby five-star hotel (the antithesis of our modest, unostentatious camp). They squealed as they exhibited their new, gas station-bought sunglasses. Entertained as I was, I was also panicking: I usually need to finish a full draft in one sitting; otherwise, it becomes impenetrable once I return to it. Thinking my escape would go unnoticed in the raucous, I slipped into the hut and locked the thin door behind me. “SARA, SARA…” They weren’t done telling stories. I wrapped up the piece, but I knew that its last third was weaker than the rest. I will admit I was disappointed, mostly because I had very high hopes for [Heaven]. I had to edit it for a month to repair the damage that the unsolicited sunset show left. In the end, I got rid of that last third of it entirely.

*I may have started writing it way before then. While searching for this [Heaven], I stumbled upon another a piece titled “Heaven” that I had apparently drafted in June 2017. Though it is very different in form and—frankly—quality, I think it was actually trying to say the same thing. Some words both Heavens have in common are: imagine / plastic / boxes.