Wanda Priday

Wanda grew up romping the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Her family raised a garden and orchard and each year the vegetables and fruit were harvested and canned. Her family also raised chickens and ducks for their eggs and meat. Her father taught her to hunt, trap and process deer, small game and fish.

She spent substantial time with her grandparents who were subsistence farmers. Every year she participated in raising a cow, hog and chickens to butcher and preserve. Her grandmother taught her how to identify edible and medicinal plants native to the Appalachian Mountains.

She attended Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and George Mason University. Her early career was in administrative management for the federal government in Washington, DC and then project management for the private sector in Chicago, IL. After her father’s death in 1998, she returned to her rural roots of Virginia. The next ten years she spent living in a rustic mountain home with harsh winters and long-term power outages that often left her single parenting 2 small children with only a wood stove for cooking and heat. Family history and life experiences lead her to assume a survivalist mentality with a metaphysical and spiritual core. She hopes her writings and workshops will inspire others to feel self-empowered. She also aspires to re-connect others with the natural world that she finds to be the soul food of her life.