In June 2026, your Land Hearts crew received the opportunity to spend a week at Chinkapin Craftstead, a Queer non-profit arts organization located near Woodbury, Tennessee on 300 acres of old-growth trees, meadows and springs. For a group that lives across four different cities, the opportunity to spend time together in person revved us up, and we did a ton of brainstorming about how to bring the Land Hearts vision to life.
We spent time preparing food and eating together, writing, and making art. And we hosted an an open residency day where we invited friends and neighbors to join us out at the Craftstead for a skill share, potluck, somatic workshop led by Sarah Ledbetter of A Vast and Humble Abode, and a fire with BYO instruments. We got to know a few amazing people who taught us how to make a rug from old t-shirts and fabric scraps, how to sing an ancestral song from Sicily, how to make handfolded minizines, and more.
Do you see the cute little bugs on our about page? Courtney drew those at Chinkapin. They are real bugs, likely to live and die out at the Craftstead. Unless they get trapped on a windshield of an 18-wheeler… or dip into a suitcase of an artist homebound to Jersey, or Montana, or if they’re lucky, Johnson City.
But our biggest achievement of the week was completing our operating agreements and bylaws, and submitting our paperwork to become a registered charity in the state of Tennessee and a 501(c)3 nonprofit recognized by the IRS!
Now that it’s done, it feels great. And it means we can officially invite you in.
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Of course, your financial support is so helpful right now. Your support helps pay to host our website and email system, our licenses, and the supplies we need to get our new partnerships and ideas off the ground. There are three amazing projects already in the works you can read about on our programs page!
Hope you enjoy the photos from our time together at Chinkapin. And of course, give them some love, too.
Thank you for the hospitality, Chinkapin Craftstead! Hope to see you again real soon.
