An interview for Sixty Inches From Center
October 2021

When I sat down to talk with Zoe Hollomon and Erin Sharkey, a married couple in love and life, the sun was blazing and the weather was still hot in Chicago. The days were slowly starting to get shorter and at that point the calendar was one of the only real signs that fall was on its way. The other sign was the pure joy that radiated from the computer screen as Zoe and Erin told me about when they would finally get to spend weeks on end at Rootsprings in Annandale, Minnesota, a 36-acre retreat center that they co-run on the unceded territory of the Dakota people. Fall 2021 would be the first time they would experience harvest season on those grounds, since February 2021 was when they and the other two married, lesbian couples of Rootsprings Cooperative reclaimed the land in the name of community, healing, revolution, and artistry.

To understand how these three couples, made up of artists, environmental organizers, and activists, acquired this ecologically vast and fertile site, you must first know the history. Prior to the members of Rootsprings Cooperative receiving the site, this Dakota land was known by some as The Fields at Wellsprings Farm. Before that, and since 1988, the land was occupied by the Franciscan Sisters of Little Falls who used it as a retreat space for the Franciscan community until it changed hands to private owners in 2014. In late 2015, a nonprofit organization called The Fields took over the management and operations of the retreat and the land, resulting in the renaming of it as The Fields at Wellsprings Farm.

The journey that led to the land being rechristened as The Fields at Rootsprings began with the social, political, and cultural jolts that shook us all in 2020, with one of the most galvanizing shifts happening with the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, where Zoe and Erin are currently based. In an effort to acknowledge the outcries for justice that were sounding loudly not only throughout the country but just hours away from them, the owners of Wellsprings Farm decided to begin conversations around transfer of ownership to local Black, Latinx, and Indigenous organizers as an act of reparations.

The space is now known as The Fields at Rootsprings. It is a site of healing and rejuvenation that centers queer and melanated artists, organizers, and healers in need of replenishment in a setting that caters to their values and also their dreams—dreams for themselves, their communities, and the Earth. The model that the six of them are creating is anchored in cooperative principles, reverence for the land, and the ancestral origins of people like them. Through Rootsprings, they are addressing the lack of spaces where freedom fighters can, if only briefly, remove their armor and focus on healing and nourishment. They are quite literally world-building towards an existence where the caretakers of the people are cared for and a life of subsistence is a distant memory.

As we enter more deeply into the winter months and sit at the edge of a transition into a new year, I am grateful for the chance to revisit Zoe and Erin’s words. The following conversation is a generous look into the endless depths of their work as individuals, as life partners, and as members of a cooperative that is sowing love seeds everywhere they go.

Read the full interview here….

Photo Credits:

[1] An illustrated portrait of Erin Sharkey and Zoe Hollomon standing in front of a body of water with a stretch of open land seen in the distance. To the left a bright red farmhouse and another building can be seen in the distance, surrounded by trees under a blue sky with light cloud coverage. Illustration by Kiki Lechuga-Dupont.

[2] An illustrated and slightly re-imagined landscape portrait of The Fields At Rootsprings, showing several of the buildings, residential spaces, and structures of the site. Next to the bright red farmhouse and another building is the Octavia E. Butler Dome. In the foreground you can see an abstracted view of plants and farmland surrounded by trees under a blue sky. Illustration by Kiki Lechuga-Dupont.