Write your story; heal your life.
private sessions * workshops * retreats
New students enjoy a 15% discount with code WELCOME15
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New students enjoy a 15% discount with code WELCOME15 〰️
Ready to write?
Whether you want to publish or process, writing with support, encouragement, guidance, and strength-based feedback can transform your writing and your life.
JOIN ME.
Retreats
My retreats offer a sacred and safe container for healing and a powerful opportunity for growth. I love fostering a supportive, nonjudgmental community where we can be daring and vulnerable, raw and real together. Whether we are in the mountains or by the sea, abroad or at home, we will spend our days weaving together the magical and the practical, creating and sharing, delighting in beauty, and learning how to find acceptance, empathy, and love for ourselves.
Workshops
Sharing our personal stories in community is a creative act of holy disruption. As we write the unique details of our lives, we discover a universal connection that contradicts our feelings of isolation and separation in a heartbroken and violent world. Through first-draft, expressive writing, we mine our memories, traumas, and dreams to draw out the threads and themes of our deepest stories, the beginnings of our memoirs, essays, poems, novels, and journal entries.
Coaching
Sometimes we need a gentle shove in the write direction. If you are interested in one-on-one guidance on getting started, finding the heart of your material, translating your idea onto the page or continuing a work in progress, a one-on-one session might be just right for you. One-on-ones are available in 60-minute sessions and include reading and feedback of up to 20 pages of text before or after each session.
Surrender Your Weapons is a marriage of selections from Valley Haggard’s memoir and a writing guide for healing, and exploring themes that have emerged in my classes and in my own writing since the publication of The Halfway House for Writers in 2015.
Surrender Your Weapons is a guide to help you write your most intimate and true stories while showing you how I wrote mine. Write your origin story, write your body, write food, write money, write sex, write the power, write God, and so much more.
There’s No Accounting for the Strangeness of Things is a memoir written in the aftermath of a father’s death, exploring how his love, absence, deliriums, and ultimately, his mortality inform the trajectory of his daughter’s life. Follow Valley Haggard through her childhood with artists and alcoholics onto a dude ranch in Colorado, a farm in Arkansas, a cruise ship in Alaska, and finally back to her childhood home in Richmond, Virginia where she started teaching creative writing classes. Written in the style of flash non-fiction, the narrative arcs towards connection and meaning in a world torn apart and then stitched back together, even though, sometimes there is still no accounting for the strangeness of things
Hi, I’m Valley.
I’m a creative writing coach, author, teacher, and energy worker with 25+ years of experience in 12-step recovery groups. Combining Reiki and Shamanic Reiki practices, I lead writing to heal workshops and sacred circles in private sessions, classes, and local and international retreats. '
I’ve led creative writing workshops for corporations, in colleges and universities, in-patient and outpatient treatment centers, libraries, 12-step conventions, and collegiate recovery. My students have included the incarcerated, women experiencing homelessness, war veterans, victims of sex trafficking, probation, and parole officers, residents in assisted living, high school students, medical students, hospice nurses, gender studies students, yoga teachers, pastors, therapists, recovering codependents, addicts, alcoholics, entrepreneurs, copywriters, first-time writers, librarians, novice writers, and published authors.
I’ve worked as a cabin girl on a dude ranch in Colorado, a hotel maid at a lodge in Arkansas, a stewardess on a cruise ship in Alaska, a Waffle House waitress on Broad Street in Richmond, VA, and as the Book Editor for Style Weekly. I graduated with a BA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and have won a couple of awards, including Richmond Magazine’s Theresa Pollak Prize, Style Weekly’s Women in the Arts Award, and the Emyl Jenkin’s Award for inspiring a love of writing from the James River Writers. My books The Halfway House for Writers, Surrender Your Weapons: Writing to Heal, There’s No Accounting for the Strangeness of Things, a memoir, and my recent deck, The Sacred Circle Writing Oracle: 88 cards with prompts and sigils are all available in the shop here on my website.
I’m passionate about helping people heal their wounded writer selves, find their voices, tell their stories, and reclaim joy and healing as their creative writing coach on the writing journey.
This handbook is for writers who are afraid to begin and writers who have begun but are afraid to continue. This handbook is for anyone haunted by writing, writers who long to write but fear it, writers who are afraid to call themselves writers. This handbook is the culmination of recurring themes and threads that have arisen in my work as a creative writing coach and in my creative writing classes again and again and the process by which my students and I have begun to recover from our crippling, debilitating, and false beliefs.
This handbook is a guide to rehabilitation for wounded writers.
Sacred Circle Writing Oracle
Sacred Circle Writing Oracle
The Sacred Circle Writing Oracle:
88 cards with prompts and sigils
to assist you on your writing journey
$35 for one deck, $60 for two decks
Listen to my guided meditations for writers on Insight Timer!
Years of observing the transformational power of writing sparked my interest in Energy Work.
How could these two powerful healing modalities be combined to make a process more potent than either are on their own?
We know that thoughts are energy and that writing down our emotions stimulates the release of serotonin in our brains, reducing stress and inducing healing. When we write our thoughts, we bring energy into form, transforming our inner state into an outer one.
Writing our feelings allows us to accept them, release them, and work with them in ways we are not able to do at the level of thinking alone.
Energy Work heightens the writing process just as the writing process heightens the quality of energy within our bodies, spirits, and minds.
When we combine writing with Reiki, Shamanic Reiki, meditation, visualization, and other forms of energy work, we create a powerful opportunity for transformation and change.
Writing and Reiki are both simple, core practices that require only our own two hands. They are transformative tools we can use anytime, anywhere, without special equipment, technology, props, or the requirement of a particular place or time. They can be practiced in groups or on our own, but they are always at our fingertips when we need them.
LOVE NOTES
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Safe, Welcoming & Comfortable
Valley created a safe, welcoming & comfortable space for our workshop. The teaching was meaningful, and nicely interspersed with practice of what we were learning, sharing among participants and guided meditation. I learned a lot and enjoyed the whole day. I left feeling very relaxed and renewed with a commitment to use what I learned. —Fontaine
