65 POETS & WRITERS^NONFICTION 2019I
grew up on a kibbutz in Israel, and
when I turned eighteen I became
an intelligence analyst as part of
my compulsory military service.
In the years after, I began looking
at the repercussions of mandatory
military service and the complexity
of the violent conflict in the Middle
East through human intimacy—both
the loss of this intimacy in times of
war and the ways in which politi-
cal violence and intimacy are inter-
twined. There are really powerful
narratives at work whenever we say
or write “Israel/Palestine” and I knew
I couldn’t get at the messiness of
human intimacy by simply recount-
ing a linear story. It was hard to find
forms that avoided cliché moves when
writing about the military and war
and surveillance, and figuring out the
syntax for each section of Love Drones
took about ten years to get right.
Despite its serious topic, the book
comes out of thinking about the essay
as an act of play f ulness—like a child-
hood game with a set of imagined
r u le s. I ’ve a lway s had a ha rd t i me w it h
beginnings, so I created a structural
constraint for myself—for example,
an essay about grenades smuggled in-
side oranges, in which the essay itself
is made of strips of paper that fit inside
a real orange, or an essay that’s part
of a functional pinhole camera. The
physical object creates its own gram-
mar, its own internal logic. This re-
sults in unexpected new questions I
wouldn’t ask if I were working only
on the page.
Of the 100 or so manuscript pages
I had when I finished my MFA at the
University of Arizona, only three had
found the form that would end up in
the final book. While on a Fulbright
in Cyprus I took those three pages
and turned them into four. I was doing
research for another manuscript, and
I didn’t write anything else that whole
year, just rewriting and rewriting
those four pages.
By the end I knew I had found the
right resonance, and that piece becamethe title essay, “Love Drones.” When
I moved back to the United States I
started working as a waiter at Zahav
in Philadelphia. I had this romantic
writerly dream of being a writer by
day, waiter by night—like I would get
to live out my twenties fantasy life in
my thirties—but of course that never
happened.
A couple of years later I started a
PhD program at the University of
Utah, and the door to experimenta-
tion opened again, then gradually
each section of the book found its
shape.
I sent the manuscript out to Sara-
bande first because I love so many of
the hybrid projects they’ve published,
so when the call came from Sarah
Gorham, I knew I was incredibly
lucky. As the Sarabande team and I
were going through the editing and
design process—and the book was be-
coming more tangible—I kept think-
ing about how these essays started as
physical con-
structions, then
became digital,
and were now on
their way to be-
coming material
again. I hope the
completed ob-
ject of the book
forms an inti-
mate connection
to the possibili-
ties of nonlinear
narratives.NOAM DORR
Love Drones (Sarabande, July), a
debut collection of essays that explore
the troubling relationship between our
desire for intimacy and the world of
military action, state violence, and in-
telligence surveillance; a form-bending
search for human connection within a
landscape of violent conflict. Agent:
None. Editor: Sarah Gorham. First
lines: “Navigate by feel until the eyes
adjust—let the aperture of the pupil
open. To walk into my father’s dark-
room means walking away from the
calls of crows and mourning doves
in the pines, from an uncontainable
saturation of sun—sun from above,
sun reflecting off the sand below—
through the worn-down wood door of
the shack that used to be a part of the
kibbutz children’s home. Six children
slept in this room once. Past the light
table and past the curtain and into a
dripping black. Then dark dissolves
into low red, and water flows off the
bodies hanging from the wires.”Despite its serious
topic, the book comes
out of thinking about
the essay as an act
of playfulness—like a
childhood game with a
set of imagined rules.
ha
gg
ai
d
or
r