Patricia Prijatel
Author and Founder
I am a wife, mother, grandmother, sister, aunt, and friend. I love nature, reading, writing, walking, painting, and being human. I live in a sunny little condo overlooking a park in Des Moines, Iowa and spend as much time as I can with my kids in Vermont and Europe and at the cabin I helped build in the shadow of the East Spanish Peak in Southern Colorado. My last name rhymes with Seattle and means friend in Slovene.
I am the E.T. Meredith Distinguished Professor Emerita at Drake University’s School of Journalism and Mass Communications, the author of Burn Scars: A Memoir of the Land and Its Loss and Surviving Triple-Negative Breast Cancer, and the co-author of The Magazine from Cover to Cover. Some of what appears here was previously published on my All Is Well blog on psychologytoday.com.
Julie Feirer
Technical Editor
I am the owner of Winterset Websites, a website design and maintenance agency that I manage from my home in downtown Des Moines, Iowa. I spend time with my husband when he’s not at work, and we make frequent road trips to visit to our daughter at Grinnell College. We also love to explore, hike, run, read, and drink a lot of coffee.
I have a BA in English from the University of Iowa and an MA in Education with endorsements in secondary reading and language arts. I taught for several years and have also dabbled in writing, but my role in this project will mostly be tech support for Pat. As I inch closer to retirement daily, I’m very interested in How to Be Old. I also hope to recover some time to write.
Patricia Prijatel and Julie Feirer are friends, collaborators, and avid readers.
They met at St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church, where they are both dedicated members of the book club: St. Timothy’s BBB.