Local author to have book signing
May 21, 2013
After raising six rambunctious kids and setting them loose on the world, Willow Feller found the time, and the peace, to pursue her passion for writing, and she'll be signing copies of her first novel, "The Epic Undoing of Haley Ann Ewing" by Evergreen Press, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday, June 1, at Bonners Books, 7159 Main Street in downtown Bonners Ferry.

Willow, a recovering Pharisee, lives with her husband Mike on an eight-acre spread in the valley overlooked by Katka Mountain, and together they enjoy all the typical North Idaho stuff; ambling along wilderness trails, cutting firewood, picking huckleberries, sparring with grizzlies.

She does not much like weeding the onion patch or "the sound of her own screaming when, while operating a cantankerous tractor, she panics and pulls the hydraulic loader control lever in all the wrong directions, causing said loader to dangle field boulders over her hard-working husband’s head.
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"Mike doesn’t enjoy that either."

She does, however, enjoy being a grandmother, and likes nothing more than the time she and mike spend with their grandkids.

They moved here from Montana, where they are both from, 10 years ago. Mike works at the Bonners Ferry Post Office, Willow, until recently, worked as a substitute mail carrier and still works part time at Boulder Creek Academy.

At heart, she's always been a writer.

""I've wanted to be a writer from the time that I was young, but didn't really get serious about writing a novel until about six years ago," she said. "The idea for this story originally arose from my own realization that I was strangely receiving back on myself many of the same judgments I had formed about others. It was humbling, but as I learned to start laughing at myself instead of beating myself up over it, the seeds of a really funny fiction story began germinating in my mind. I combined this with my years and years of self-teaching and research on the craft of writing and eventually completed the manuscript for this novel. I jumped through all the hoops a first-time author is told to jump through and received dozens of the necessary rejections before first landing an agent over a year ago, and then going on to contract with Evergreen Press. It was an arduous process, but wow ... have I ever learned a lot along the way!"

"I had the privilege of reading a pre-released draft of this book, and it’s HILARIOUS!" said Cora Roberts, author of "No Other Rock." "You should definitely all indulge in some witty Christian fiction this fall.”

"Epic Undoing" is a fast-paced Christian comedy.

Facing a cataclysmic identity crisis, pregnant Haley is battling for her very life. Her life as an eco-chic, semi-vegan Christian, that is.

She hadn’t counted on being thrust into a war zone when she agreed to leave her East Coast life and go with her husband, Rick, to the Montana outback for the summer. Rather than run from it, Haley decides it is her God-given mission to subdue and educate the redneck forces that discount her superior vocabulary and her superior hairdo.

With no help from Rick or his freaky Aunt Win, Haley dives headfirst into her mission only to find herself sucked irretrievably into a maelstrom of humiliating mishaps.

With tensions mushrooming as fast as her waistline, will Haley see that she is actually living out the reality of the scripture, “Do not judge, or you too will be judged.”

And just how many car explosions and massive wardrobe malfunctions will it take for her to realize that it is her own critical judgments of others that are boomeranging back on her?

"The Epic Undoing of Haley Ann Ewing" stands alone, but it's actually the first book of a trilogy, and Willow is already about half-way through the manuscript of book two.

"One of the main underlying themes of "Epic Undoing" is highlighted in my blog, "The Pharisee in Me" at http://www.thephariseeinme.wordpress.com," Willow said. "Learning how to blog and use social media has been a necessary part of the marketing phase of my writing. It's also been a huge learning curve for me, but rewarding, nonetheless."

If you can't attend the signing, signed copies of the novel are available for $14 on her website, http://www.willowfeller.com/, it's also stocked at Bonners Books, at bookstores in Coeur d'Alene, Missoula and Kalispell, and on websites including Amazon and Barnes and Noble.