Fruitful road to Salmon Creek Farm...
...and the queer communes along the way.
We welcome you to Millipede Members Monthly 🐌 with this introductory post from our friend (and Salmon Creek Arts board member) Ari Shapiro. We plan to post monthly, available to our subscribers, Salmon Creek Arts members, and Salmon Creek Farm retreaters. Let us know if you haven’t been automatically subscribed and we will add you! 🐾
January 16th, 2024
Fritz Haeg and I don’t remember the first time we met. But we both know exactly where and when it happened. It was August, 2008, on a farm in McMinnville, Oregon. The weekend of the full moon, to be exact, which would have been Saturday, August 16th. It was the beginning of a journey that would lead us to reunite more than a decade later at Salmon Creek Farm.
Our mutual friend Ramsey McPhillips was hosting his last ever Fruit Farm Film Festival. (Ramsey is still very much with us; only the festival has passed away.) Fruit Farm was a queer campout and cinematic experience. In the morning, people picked blackberries for pancakes. In the afternoon, Thomas Lauderdale of the band Pink Martini serenaded us on a grand piano under the shade of an oak tree. As the sun set, we dined in a field as drag queens presented platters of food, lit by candles impaled on pitchforks. After that, movies were projected on the sides of barns late into the night.
As this post by Erika Vogt in ArtForum described it:
This past summer, I entered a film paradise, a weekend retreat at a ranch in Oregon where campers spent their days swimming in a muddy creek and their nights watching films—the experience was transformative. A highlight was Stuart Comer’s program of rare Derek Jarman shorts. The unapologetically nostalgic and sentimental lineup played after a banquet dinner that seated three hundred guests at tables made from hay, while the amazing and notorious German actor Udo Kier, honorary guest and recipient of the festival’s Lifetime Crisis Award, gave spontaneous performances. During his acceptance speech, he did a rendition of his infamous “lamp scene” from My Own Private Idaho (1991).
It was a transformative experience for me and Fritz, too. Fruit Farm set me on a path that led to the radical faeries. That movement, founded by Harry Hay in 1979, exists today in sanctuaries where people live together under a set of values that align with the faerie ethos. (I write in more detail about the faeries and my connection to them in Chapter 11 of my memoir, The Best Strangers In the World …a book that I began writing at Salmon Creek Farm, in Cedar cabin.)
For Fritz, the Fruit Farm experience deepened his interest in intentional communities…which eventually led him in 2014 to purchase the land and cabins of Salmon Creek Farm - a place that, as he puts it, “has a special sense of sanctuary for those who often don’t feel safe or welcome in rural spaces, especially BIPOC and LGBTQ+ folks.”
Our separate roads converged again in the summer of 2019. I was attending a “Fourth of Nature” gathering over 4th of July weekend at a retreat center in Northern California called Groundswell. I had heard that some of my friends were at a place nearby called Salmon Creek Farm, though I didn’t know much about it.
One afternoon, those friends rolled up to Groundswell in a van and announced that they were kidnapping me. I arrived at Salmon Creek Farm after dark and couldn’t quite get my bearings. I slept in Walden Cabin. When I woke up, I looked out the window at fog drifting over the redwood trees. As the sun broke through at the outdoor kitchen over breakfast, Fritz and I assembled the puzzle pieces and realized that we had each been on a long, circuitous route leading us to this place.
Now, I’m excited to help write the next chapter of this story as a board member of Salmon Creek Arts, a new land-based arts non-profit at Salmon Creek Farm with the aim to lower barriers wherever possible to those drawn to visit, in particular artists* who engage with the environment and ecology.
Our inaugural membership and fundraising drive hopes to raise $60k by April. This will get us started by supporting the first season, to initiate the Salmon Creek Artist Fellowship and then to support the programs that SCF has been offering informally for many years including writing retreats, food gardening & carpentry skill-shares, wood-fire ceramics workshops, and our BIPOC artists retreats through the rest of the year.
If you want to support what we’re doing, there are three valuable ways you can help:
Donate. This page makes it easy for you to contribute. A one-time tax-deductible gift is deeply appreciated, or better yest become a monthly member.
Subscribe. We just started an instagram account plus an email list for special announcements, but this monthly newsletter will keep you up to date on all of the latest gossip from the land. You can expect recipes, essays, history, updates from the land, recommendations for the area, Q&As, and more.
Share. One of our goals is to open up Salmon Creek Farm to a wider community of artists. As we begin this new chapter, we want to get the word out. We would love for you to amplify our message in whatever way feels right to you. Forward this newsletter, repost our fundraiser on instagram, email people in your circle of contacts…or all of the above!
I’m very excited for what the new year has in store for Salmon Creek Arts. Thank you for being a part of this community. Here’s to the next chapter!
P.S. After I wrote this, I shared it with Fritz. He went back to his archives and dug out his photographs from 2008. He only has three images from that weekend with people in them, including this one. That’s me in the blue t-shirt, staring straight into Fritz’s camera:
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