Cora Anderson did not set out to write the Feri Tradition's reference text. In 1994 she wrote Fifty Years in the Feri Tradition as a private gift for her husband Victor, marking fifty years of marriage and of the shared teaching work that had, decades earlier, become the tradition the two of them are credited with founding on the American West Coast. Victor Anderson, blind since childhood, worked as a poet and teacher rather than as a writer of doctrinal prose, and the couple's tradition had spread for years mainly through direct oral instruction, teacher to student, rather than through any settled written statement either of them had put their name to.
That transmission method had a cost the book was written partly to answer. Students who had received only a portion of the teaching, or who had learned it secondhand from someone else's partial account, carried away versions of Feri belief and practice that did not always agree with each other or with what the Andersons themselves taught. Cora's book, brief and written in a personal, conversational voice rather than as a formal treatise, gave the tradition something it had not had before: a short statement in a founder's own words that a reader anywhere could check an account against. When Acorn Guild Press brought out a wider trade edition in 2005, that private anniversary gift became, in practice, the closest thing to a founding reference text the Feri Tradition has ever had in print.