Beth Howard didn’t have any qualifications, per say, when she applied to work at a pie shop in Malibu, California.

Well, except for the fact she’s from Iowa.

Those rural bona fides were enough. Howard got the job.

But more than a paycheck, Howard gained a passion for the healing forces of pie that has become a weather vane in her life, a directional force.

She traveled the world — from New Zealand to Switzerland to Lebanon — baking pies and wrote a memoir about the connections she made, slice by slice. She opened a pie shop in the American Gothic house in Eldon, Iowa, and penned a cookbook. She took pies to Newtown, Connecticut, after the Sandy Hook school shooting. And she used pie to work through her own grief after her husband died unexpectedly.

Now she’s released a documentary,

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