About this Event
Local author K.J. Ramsey is sharing her poetic, darkly funny memoir of one woman’s trip across the national parks straight into life-threatening illness and the joy that still holds us, no matter how much life hurts. She will be with us on Friday, May 22nd at 6:00 PM at our Colfax location to share about her book, The Place Between Our Pains: A Memoir of What Joy Can Survive.
Registration includes the following options:
- A signed Hardcover copy of the book … OR
- A $5 Gift Card to Tattered Cover Book Store
This event includes an opportunity to meet the author, participate in an audience Q&A after the conversation, and get your book(s) signed and personalized. Photos with the author are welcome!
We will have a limited supply of additional books for guests to purchase in store. Only a book ticket guarantees you a copy of the book.
If you are unable to attend the event after purchasing a ticket, you are required to pick up your copy of the book (with proof of purchase from your event registration) within 7 days after the event date. If the book is not picked up by that date, you relinquish your copy to Tattered Cover Book Store.
ABOUT THE BOOK
After over a decade of fighting chronic illness, trauma therapist and beloved author K.J. Ramsey was the healthiest she’d been in her life. She packed up her Jeep and set out on a summer of road trips, returning to the places where she first glimpsed joy as a kid. More than adventure, her aim was a personal dare to discover that joy is more trustworthy than trauma.
The plan was simple but bold: Drive. Write. Heal. What could go wrong?
It turns out, everything.
The woman who just wandered through Redwood forests and ran naked into the Pacific suddenly found herself in the hospital fighting to stay alive. A mysterious illness struck like lightning, splintering the best days of her life into the absolute scariest. Ramsey went from being afraid of dying to afraid of living the life she was left with—losing both her mobility and the language of her faith, medically gaslit, with no map out of her misery. Was joy actually a trick? Or was joy still possible—even in inescapable pain?
Told with unhinged humor, lyrical honesty, and zero patience for toxic positivity, The Place Between Our Pains is a true story that reaches past our expectations of what joy can survive. From banana slugs to bedpans, mushrooms to the Mayo Clinic, hospitals to holy rage, Ramsey invites us into the unlikely places where joy lives. Through a full year of recovery, she encounters love that doesn’t leave—even when life doesn’t get easier. This is a love letter to every life seared by pain or autoimmune disease and a fierce permission slip to show up in the stories we never would have written for ourselves.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
K.J. Ramsey is increasingly feral and utterly devoted to the joy of being alive. She is a disabled mystic, a body-centered licensed professional counselor specialized in trauma recovery, and an acclaimed author of prose and poetry, including The Book of Common Courage, The Lord Is My Courage, and This Too Shall Last, as well as the bestselling essay Substack Embodied. KJ advocates for fellow autoimmune patients and lives in Colorado with her husband Ryan, a hospice chaplain, and their two wildly cuddly Velcro dogs.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Tattered Cover Colfax, 2526 East Colfax Avenue, Denver, United States
USD 7.25 to USD 35.86











