Author’s Note:

Paradise

I had never seriously considered pursuing writing long-term  until my first (and only) fiction writing class, with the legendary (to me) Ty Jaeger at Hendrix College, who first gave me the courage by neatly penning, in teal ink in the margin of one of my stories, you should take more creative writing courses.

“Paradise” is, by coincidence, the final project for that same class—or, at least, a version of it, rehashed and half-eaten and thrown into a Tupperware and refrigerated and nibbled at for a few days and moved the freezer and forgotten about and eventually reheated and wrapped in a tortilla for a salsa-slathered leftovers burrito that, while technically the same thing, doesn’t actually taste anything like the original. I’d say this is an improvement. Leftovers do, in my opinion, almost always taste better than the original.