Valley Haggard is an author, teacher, energy worker, and spiritual life coach with twenty + years in 12-step recovery.
A Reiki master and Shamanic Reiki practitioner, she combines energy work and other healing modalities with expressive writing in sacred circles and healing narrative workshops both locally and internationally.
Prior to offering writing workshops, Reiki certifications, and transformational retreats, Valley was a Waffle House waitress, a dude ranch cabin girl, a hotel maid, a cruise ship stewardess, and a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College.
She has received Richmond Magazine’s Theresa Pollak Prize, Style Weekly’s Women in the Arts Award, and the James River Writers’ Emyl Jenkins award.
She writes books, teaches classes and retreats, holds private sessions, and shares a weekly blog, Skip the Small Talk, and God Is My Boyfriend: Recovery from Sex and Love Addiction and My Quest for the Divine.
Valley lives in Richmond, Virginia with her family of dogs, cats, and humans.
Valley is the author of …
The Halfway House for Writers, Surrender Your Weapons: Writing to Heal, and her memoir, There’s No Accounting for the Strangeness of Things.
There’s No Accounting for the Strangeness of Things
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. 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.
Surrender Your Weapons: Writing to Heal
Of all the lessons I’ve needed to learn as a writer and a human being, Surrender Your Weapons resurfaces most. Weapons take many forms and manifestations, many of which we wield against ourselves. Judgment, comparison, impossible expectations, perfectionism, doubt, insecurity, destructive behavior, and self-sabotage. Surrender Your Weapons began as the first rule of The Halfway House and grew until it became a book all its own. When we surrender our weapons, our true writing and our true selves begin to emerge in our lives and on the page in a way that is brave, beautiful, and true.
The Halfway House for Writers
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 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.