About Michelle Dowd

I’m a writer, teacher, and forager, and the author of Forager: Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult. I spent over 25 years as a tenured college professor before leaving academia to build a life closer to the land, creative practice, and community.

I grew up on a mountain in an apocalyptic cult, where I learned how to survive in the wilderness. I was also taught to distrust my instincts and desires, and much of my life’s work has been finding my way back to them.

These days, I live and write in the mountains of Southern California, where I founded Forager Wildlife, a forest santuary devoted to art, attention, land, and gathering. I write about wildness, both the kind outside our doors and the kind we carry inside us, and about what becomes possible when we begin trusting our bodies, our curiosity, and our own ways of knowing.

My work lives at the crossroads of story, ecology, creativity, mythology, and self-trust. I’m interested in the intelligence of the living world, the ways beauty can return us to ourselves, and the small daily practices that make a life feel more alive.

My writing has appeared in The New York Times, TIME, The Los Angeles Times, The Alpinist, The Los Angeles Review of Books, ORION, and other national publications.

Now I write books, teach, lead retreats and gatherings, and spend as much time as I can walking in the forest, paying attention to animals, reading, writing, and following my curiosity.

I think of all of this as foraging: learning to recognize what nourishes us, gathering what is alive, and trusting ourselves to know the difference.