Bio

NNicole Faires was born in Tucson, Arizona, to a semi-nomadic homeschooling family. After traveling over most of the western U.S., they finally settled in Montana where she grew her own food, made her own clothes and generally ruined her teenage social life. She later moved to Canada and had three precocious girls. She now lives on Vancouver Island where she spends her spare time writing and experimenting with sustainable lifestyles.

She has been a writer and sustainability advocate for 15 years and works as a researcher and technical administrator for worthy non-profit groups in the fields of health, local food, and the arts.   She studied business at Thompson Rivers University and is a member of The Author’s Guild.  She also runs a city SPIN farm: Faires Farms.

She met her husband on the Internet before it was cool and moved to Canada.  She has dual citizenship but her home base is on beautiful Vancouver Island, British Columbia, which is the best place to await a zombie apocalypse. 

She is the author of The Ultimate Guide to Homesteading and The Ultimate Guide to Permaculture published by Skyhorse Publishing.  She is also the author of various articles including “Bus Mama” which appeared in the final March/April 2011 issue of Mothering Magazine.

I am the author of…

The Ultimate Guide to Homesteading: An Encyclopedia of Independent Living (Skyhorse Publishing, 2011)

The Ultimate Guide to Permaculture (Skyhorse Publishing, 2012)

The Ultimate Guide to Food Activism (Skyhorse Publishing, 2013)

“Bus Mama” (Mothering Magazine, Mar/Apr 2011)

How to contact me…

You can email me at nfaires at me dot com.  Facebook and Twitter are good places to keep in contact with me.  If you are interested in advertising, contact me at the above email address.  And a disclaimer: the views and opinions expressed on my sponsors websites does not necessarily reflect my own.

Sponsors

Articles & Interviews:

The Renegade Farmer podcast interview.

“Get Growing” with Farmer Fred on Talk 650, Sacramento

“Bus Mama” podcast interview and article in Mothering Magazine Mar/Apr 2011

What happened to DeliberateLife.com?

I had published a successful book which was available on Amazon, using Lulu’s self-publishing service. It was called Deliberate Life: The Ultimate Homesteading Guide.  This book is now called The Ultimate Guide to Homesteading: An Encyclopedia of Independent Living and is published by Skyhorse Publishing. The Deliberate Life name isn’t really being used anymore and I thought after 12 years maybe it’s time to write another book with a different title and maybe a different topic – thus this website came to be.

What does Deliberate Life mean anyway?

Living deliberately was sort of my motto for a long time, drawn from a very well-known Thoreau quote: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

To me the deliberate life isn’t just about gardening and homesteading, but encompasses a vast renaissance of thinking that involves philosophies about culture, work, spirituality, parenting, etc.  etc.  To me it means to make choices by looking backwards from the end of my life to make sure I had really lived.

What’s all this about a bus?

The Albatross was a 37′ flat-faced Blue Bird school/ski bus that we converted into a home on wheels.  In a past life it took happy skiers up to the Heavenly Ski Resort by Lake Tahoe. We had plans to make the bus steampunk-style but that turned out to be more difficult that we thought.   Steampunk is an art/sub-culture/philosophy that takes the Victorian age and blends it with fantasy and science fiction Jules-Verne-style.  We lived in it for a year during 2010 and 2011 as it was being converted and travelled around in it, in a kind of ultimate camping-family project experience. If you want to know more about the nitty-gritty of living in and converting a bus, I can direct you to our how-to YouTube videos.  Check out this page to see pictures of it.