About
Willa Goodfellow likes to travel. In college she hitchhiked through Germany and cleaned hotel rooms in Liechtenstein. She comet-gazed in Australia and camped in Arches National Park. She gambled in Mexico and won a pasta-making contest in Tuscany. She swam in the Irish Sea. No, she jumped in, screamed, and jumped out. It was cold!
She also likes to write. While writing was always part of her work as a priest and preacher, she found Costa Rica to be a fertile environment and incubator for a life change.
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.
Willa’s second book, A Gritty Little Tourist Town, 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, entertaining, heart-warming, astounding, and most often hilarious. She would go home 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, place, and time of a gritty little tourist town on the edge of the Pacific Ocean.
Willa now lives in County Kerry, Ireland where she and her wife serve in the Church of Ireland. They hike, travel, and enjoy cooking and eating good food. She still misses her dog Mazie.
You can find Willa online on Substack, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
