Michelle Dowd presents 'Forager: Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult'

Third Place Books welcomes professor of journalism and founder of The Chaffey Review Michelle Dowd to our Ravenna store! Dowd will be discussing her memoir of California nature and escape from an apocalyptic cult, Forager: Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult. This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required in advance.

This event will include a public signing and time for audience Q&A. Sustain our author series by purchasing a copy of the featured book!

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This event is free to attend. Registration is required in advance.

In the tradition of Educated and The Glass Castle, this shattering and poetic memoir from a brave new voice tells the story of the author’s experience in an apocalyptic cult, and how understanding the natural world was her key to escape—and survival.

My family prepared me for the end of the world, but I know how to survive on what the earth yields.

As a child, Michelle Dowd grew up on a mountain in the Angeles National Forest. She was born into an ultra-religious cult—or the Field as they called it—started in the 1930s by her grandfather, a mercurial, domineering, and charismatic man who convinced generations of young male followers that he would live 500 years and ascend to the heavens when doomsday came. Comfort and care are sins, Michelle is told. As a result, she was forced to learn the skills necessary to battle hunger, thirst, and cold; she learned to trust animals more than humans; and most importantly, she learned how to survive in the natural world.

At the Field, a young Michelle lives a life of abuse, poverty, and isolation, as she obeys her family’s rigorous religious and patriarchal rules—which are so extreme that Michelle is convinced her mother would sacrifice her, like Abraham and Isaac, if instructed by God. She often wears the same clothes for months at a time; she is often ill and always hungry for both love and food. She is taught not to trust Outsiders, and especially not Quitters, nor her own body and its warnings.

But as Michelle gets older, she realizes she has the strength to break free. Focus on what will sustain, not satiate you, she tells herself. Use everything. Waste nothing. Get to know the intricacies of the land, like the intricacies of your body. And so she does.

Using stories of individual edible plants and their uses to anchor each chapter, Forager is both a searing coming-of-age story and a meditation on the ways in which understanding nature can lead to freedom, even joy.

Michelle Dowd is a professor of journalism and contributor to the New York Times, Alpinist, The Los Angeles Book Review, Catapult, OnlySky, and other national publications. She founded The Chaffey Review, an award-winning literary journal, advises student media, teaches poetry and critical thinking in the California State prisons and has been recognized as a Longreads Top 5 for The Thing with Feathers, on the relationship between environmentalism and hope. She guides yoga and meditation workshops throughout southern California, where she hikes the peaks with her four dogs. (Photo credit: Noel Besuzzi)

Founded in 1998 in Lake Forest Park, Washington, Third Place Books is dedicated to the creation of a community around books and the ideas inside them. With locations in Lake Forest Park and Seattle's Ravenna and Seward Park neighborhoods, Third Place Books is proud to serve the entire Seattle metro area. Learn more about their event series at thirdplacebooks.com/events.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Third Place Books, 6504 20th Ave NE, Seattle, United States