A Man Apart: Bill Coperthwaite's Radical Experiment in Living

A story of friendship, encouragement, and the quest to design a better world

A Man Apart is the story--part family memoir and part biography--of Peter Forbes and Helen Whybrow's longtime friendship with Bill Coperthwaite (A Handmade Life), whose unusual life and fierce ideals helped them examine and understand their own.

Coperthwaite inspired many by living close to nature and in opposition to contemporary society, and was often compared to Henry David Thoreau. Much like Helen and Scott Nearing, who were his friends and mentors, Coperthwaite led a 55-year-long "experiment in living" on a remote stretch of Maine coast. There he created a homestead of wooden, multistoried yurts, a form of architecture for which he was known around the world.

Coperthwaite also embodied a philosophy that he called "democratic living," which was about empowering all people to have agency over their lives in order to create a better community. The central question of Coperthwaite's life was, "How can I live according to what I believe?"

In this intimate and honest account--framed by Coperthwaite's sudden death and brought alive through the month-long adventure of building with him what would turn out to be his last yurt--Forbes and Whybrow explore the timeless lessons of Coperthwaite's experiment in intentional living and self-reliance. They also reveal an important story about the power and complexities of mentorship: the opening of one's life to someone else to learn together, and carrying on in that person's physical absence.

While mourning Coperthwaite's death and coming to understand the real meaning of his life and how it endures through their own, Forbes and Whybrow craft a story that reveals why it's important to seek direct experience, to be drawn to beauty and simplicity, to create rather than critique, and to encourage others.

Peter has become a leader for the American conservation movement by creating a life in conservation as photographer, writer, and storyteller about the relationship between people and place. For the last fifteen years, Peter has focused his energies on bringing together and strengthening the worlds of environmentalism and social justice and offering those professions his experience with story, facilitation, contemplative practice, and relationship to nature. Peter is always learning and innovating across the boundaries of profession, culture, and home, and this has made his work influential to the different fields of leadership development, sustainability, philanthropy, and conservation. You might find him teaching spoon-carving on a city street, or giving a keynote address on courage at a national conference, or helping to heal a fracture within a community, or photographing a lost art. What he cares most about is strengthening people's connections to one another and the land that sustains them, the most visible and important example being his family's farm and tapestry in the Mad River Valley of Vermont. He is the co-editor of Our Land, Ourselves, author of The Great Remembering and What Is a Whole Community, and co-author of Coming to Land in a Troubled World, and collaborated with William Coperthwaite as the photographer for A Handmade Life. You can learn more about him at Peterforbes.org.

Helen's life as an educator, farmer, and writer follows a career in book publishing, where she was most recently an acquiring editor for W. W. Norton and the publisher of their Countryman Press imprint. She left publishing to cofound, with Peter Forbes, what became a nationally recognized place of learning and change-making--Center for Whole Communities--at their home place of Knoll Farm in central Vermont. She now manages their organic family farm and consults for Vermont Farm Viability and the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont while also homeschooling their daughter and continuing her writing life. She is the editor of Dead Reckoning and co-editor of Our Land, Ourselves and The Story Handbook, among other works. You can learn more about their farm and ongoing projects at www.knollfarm.org.