Chaucer’s Book Talk and Fundraiser for the Wilderness Youth Project (WYP)

Wednesday March 4, 2026 – 6:00 PM Chaucer’s Books (3321 State Street) hosts author Kathleen Lockyer for a book talk and signing of Wild Inside: How Nature Protects Your Child’s Mental Health and Restores Yours

*This event also serves as a fundraiser for the Wilderness Youth Project (WYP). From 5 PM to 7 PM on March 4, 10% of all sales benefit the WYP, who will be on hand to answer questions about the program.  

Book Description

Drawing on almost three decades of practice as an occupational therapist and from deeply personal pieces of her own story, Kathleen Lockyer offers a powerful re-framing of how children develop and how adults can heal alongside them. Kathleen shows parents, educators, and healers how to transform behavior by learning how to build a healthy nervous system, with nature as a wise guide.

Lockyer reveals how many modern childhoods suffer from developmental deprivation, leading to challenges often mislabeled as anxiety, inattention, or defiance. By helping the readers see nature as an essential need for healthy development, she introduces her concepts of ecoception (our innate sensory connection to nature) and relational-regulation (how the nervous system is shaped by interacting). Together, they serve as a trauma-informed, nature-based antidote to the disconnection driving today’s mental-health crisis.

About the Author

For thirty years, Kathleen Lockyer has worked at the intersection of occupational therapy, neuroscience, and the living world, helping families rethink mental health, resilience, and human development through relationship, sensory health, and nature. Raised a little wild by a rugged fisherman from Newfoundland and a little refined by a debutante from New York City, she brings both grit and grace to everything she teaches and writes. Her debut book, Wild Inside: How Nature Protects Your Child’s Mental Health and Restores Yours, has been praised by Richard Louv as a “sacred cause,” calling Kathleen a “personal hero” with a “gentle, persistent, beautiful voice.” She lives on California’s Central Coast with her partner and their Great Pyrenees mix, continuing her advocacy for nature as an essential relationship for the human nervous system.