About the Author

ANANDA FOREST was born George Emery Vaillant in Boston in 1959. He went to Andover, Oberlin, and Yale Law School and later taught English at St. Ann’s School in Brooklyn. In 1994, he left the city for upstate New York, where he worked as a carpenter and mechanic and started seriously following his bliss. For the next twenty-five years, he worked as a carpenter but never stopped teaching: twelve years guiding students of shamanism at Spirit Hollow, the nature and spirituality center he co-founded, and the last thirteen years and counting as an adjunct instructor of anthropology, history, and mythology at the Community College of Vermont.