Author Willa Goodfellow will be reading from her newly published humor/travel book, "A Gritty Little Tourist Town", at the Pioneer Bookshop, Wednesday, April 15, at 5:00 p.m.. Willa served as the parish priest of St. Paul's Episcopal Church, in Grinnell, from1988-1992. She is visiting from her current home in Country Kerry, Ireland where she and her wife serve the Church of Ireland. Her new book came out of afternoons spent at the Pato Loco, her sister's bar in Playas del Coco, Costa Rica, where she heard all kinds of stories. She would go back to her little casita and write them down. During the Covid years, she turned fifteen years' worth of collected bar tales into a memoir to preserve the extraordinary people, places, and time of a gritty little tourist town on the edge of the Pacific Ocean.
Willa’s first book, Prozac Monologues, emerged from a hypomanic episode that interrupted her first trip to Costa Rica. That book led to a career shift, from priest to mental health journalist. Her journalism attracted the attention of leading psychiatrists who worked on the DSM-5. She blogs, appears on podcasts, and does trainings and presentations. She has spoken to National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) chapters, medical students, community groups, professional organizations, camp counselors, and writers. Topics have included the brain science of stress and self care, diagnosis and misdiagnosis of bipolar disorder, the process of recovery, suicide prevention, and the intersection of faith, spirituality, and mental illness. Humor is an essential element in every one of her presentations.
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