Surrender Your Weapons: Writing to Heal
a 12-session series

Fridays, 12 - 2 pm

May

May 3: Write Your Origin Story

May 10: Writing the Body

May 17: Writing Food

June

June 7: Writing Money

June 14: Writing Sex

June 21: Writing Addiction + Recovery

Pricing

1 session: $50

3 sessions:  $125 ($25 savings)

6 sessions: $250 ($50 savings)

9 sessions: $375  ($75 savings)

12 sessions: $500  ($100 savings—PLUS a free 60-minute private session with Valley)

Join me on Friday afternoons, May - August 2024 for a brand new 12-session series using Valley’s book,

Surrender Your Weapons: Writing to Heal.

Attend one, several, or all!!

1, 3, 6, 9, and 12 session packages available!

All workshops will be held on Zoom, Friday afternoons, 12 - 2 pm, EST. All sharing is optional.

Surrender Your Weapons.

Surrender to the Process.

When we surrender to the great world of the heart and the spirit that writing inhabits, our true writing begins. 

We don’t have to fight what comes. We just have to let it.

Surrendering to the process means we don’t always write what we want to write. It means we write what we need to write

We learn how to trust what comes. We surrender the weapons we use against ourselves, allowing our subconscious to guide our hand toward the stories that are most powerful to tell.

1. Write Your Origin Story
Friday, May 3, 12 - 2 pm

Our lives come with their own mythologies, fairy tales, and origin stories. From our parents to our ancestors, known or lost, available or mysterious, the people, tribes and cultures we come from create the backstory for who we are today. 

When we write, we create a legacy whether we choose to hand it down to those who come after us or not. Writing our origin story is the foundation for everything else to come.

2. Writing the Body
Friday, May 10, 12 - 2 pm

An infinite supply of stories are written into our bodies. The parenthesis between our birth and our death, our bodies are rich with miracles, betrayals, pleasures, pains, traumas, and triumphs. There are stories buried in our bones, weaving together the cracks in our broken hearts, in the origin stories, and the mythologies of our lives.

Writing comes as much from our bodies, our hearts, our guts, our throats, our chests, as from the thoughts formulated in our heads. Let’s listen to our bodies, and tell their stories together.

3. Writing Food
Friday, May 17, 12 - 2 pm

We drink from our mother’s breast, or from a bottle. We were fed when we were hungry or we were allowed to stay hungry too long. We discovered the world of food as we grew, introduced to new flavors, new cultures, new temperatures, new textures, new ways of experiencing the world. Because it activates all of the senses at once, writing about food is a direct way to enter into certain times or characters of our lives. 

4. Writing Money
Friday, June 7, 12 - 2 pm

We’re not supposed to talk about money in polite company which makes it all the more important that we write about it. Each of us has a lifelong relationship with money, whether we grew up rich or poor, whether we are currently loaded or broke. We may support ourselves or we may be supported by someone else. We may feel strong and independent or indebted, kept, and bound. We may feel guilty for having too much money or ashamed that we don’t have enough. The amount of money in our bank accounts and how we spend it has a story to tell. Writing about money is a way to write about who we’ve been and who we’re becoming.

5. Writing Sex
Friday, June 14, 12 - 2 pm

We can write about sex as love, or sex as a weapon. We can write about sex as assault or abuse or punishment. As romance or experiment. As exploration or discovery. We can write about sex as the forbidden and taboo or the mundane and ordinary.

We can write about sex as the genesis of new life or the beginning of an affair. We can write about sex that stays within or crosses or defies gender. We can write about sex as stereotype or self-definition, within marriage or after divorce. Sex as sin or salvation.

There are so many ways to write about sex. To further character, to further plot, as political analysis. Sex as a practical act, a spiritual union, a non-verbal contract. Body-to-body communication. 

6. Writing Addiction + Recovery
Friday, June 21, 12 - 2 pm

Writing our addictions might not fix them, but it can help us get through them. Writing helps us process, understand, excavate, and resurface. It helps us recover. Our writing might delve into the underworld of disease and darkness in a hundred different manifestations but can be full of recovery too, the healing, the light, the a-has, the discoveries. Writing can be a lifeline to help us crawl out of hell, pulling us back onto the land of the living. 

Addiction manifests in many different ways. We might be addicted to substances or to people or to ways of thinking. We might be addicted to thoughts or behaviors or distractions. What addictions do you need to write about? How can writing transform and strengthen your recovery?

7. Writing Monsters + Muses
Friday, July 12, 12 - 2 pm

When we revisit monsters from our past, monsters that haunt us still, I think we shouldn’t try to fight them alone. We need a guide or a muse to help us encounter our monsters without being torn to shreds or sucked down under forever. My monster is handsome and vicious. Charming and smart. His tongue is a knife and his words cut through to the bone. My monster doesn’t just tell me my writing is bad or boring or worthless, my monster tells me that I am bad and boring and worthless, too.

My muse loves and adores me. Encourages and comforts me. My muse wants me to tell my story. Are you still waiting to meet your muse?

8. Writing Grief
Friday, July 19, 12 - 2 pm

Writing grief is one way to help survive the experience of it. It’s a way of staying grounded when oceans of feeling threaten to wash us away. It’s a way to transform the unbearable and ineffable into something solid, something tangible, something we can begin to wrap our minds around. Writing helps us process our emotions, so we can begin to release them. Writing is something we can do when nothing else can be done.

9. Write the Power
Friday, July 26, 12 - 2 pm

Telling the truth and healing our pain is a revolutionary and political act. Writing down what we believe and putting our writing into the world is a bold act of resistance. Telling our stories as survivors, as minorities, as women, as those in recovery or struggling with issues of mental health, shines illuminates the world’s narrative. Using our privilege to support and uplift those whose voices are not heard is our birthright and our imperative. 

We don’t have to wait until we are perfect or enlightened or published or have a position of great power to add our voice to the political arena. We can heal ourselves and give back to the world in tandem. 

10. Writing God
Friday, August 9, 12 - 2 pm
Writing about our relationship with God (whatever we choose to call God), prayer, spirituality, and belief is vulnerable, powerful and transformational.

We don’t have to be religious or even spiritual to feel the connection and community that writing in a safe community can provide. We just have to be human enough to show up and be who we are -- no small task in the world outside.

If we can sit in a room and say out loud what’s truly happening beneath our outside personas and costumes and roles and masks as best we can, we can learn to honor the meet the sacred and honor the divine.

11. Writing Meditation + Prayer
Friday, August 16, 12 - 2 pm

Many spiritual traditions also encourage us to stay in the present moment, to be here now, to savor the gifts of the day. Beginning with the words “Right Now I Am” is a powerful way to launch a written meditation. 

We can write with intention, slowing our hand and the pace of our thoughts. We can meditate on a mantra or a prayer or a theme or simply follow what’s already there waiting to come out all on its own. In this case, the process of writing holds more healing properties than the product. Written meditations are about the act of slowing down, going within, and listening deeply to our innermost selves, not about creating a piece for critique or publication. 

Writing our prayers is a practical way to perform a holy act. It’s a way to communicate directly with our definition of the divine. Writing down what we hope for, what terrifies us, our fear and our longing allows those feelings not to stay trapped as thoughts in our minds. The physical act of communication with our versions of God – in the form of nature, the universe, or a deity --  helps give form to our side of the conversation.

12. Writing to Heal
Friday, August 23, 12 - 2 pm

Much has been written about the research-based positive healing impact writing has on the immune system, as well as the mental, emotional, and physical health of the writer. I’m thrilled scientists have evidence and numbers, but anyone who has used writing in their life consistently already knows. Writing heals.

Of course, I have fought the writing process, too. Hard. To avoid writing I’ve taken up professional scrapbooking, stained glass making, basket weaving, crochet, addictions, bad jobs, and bad habits.

And still, writing has been the healing modality of my life that I’ve returned to again and again. Writing can be a weapon if we use it against ourselves, but it is also a powerful medicine, an antidote to whatever our poison may be.