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Writing Fire Circle
31 members • $11/month
12 contributions to Writing Fire Circle
3d •
Tell me how you really feel.
We had a wonderful Release and Reclaim workshop last night....thank you so much to @Sharon Comunale, @Cate Fitt, and @Mina Smith for sharing your beautiful hearts! Please join me this afternoon at 2 PM EST for Conversations with the Goddess...it's always a revealing, connecting, and cathartic experience! During a coca leaf reading by a shaman during a retreat in Peru on my 48th birthday, I was told that my job here on earth was to share all my stories with people, good and bad. I already knew what he said to be true. I have always found I connect most deeply into universal life force energy when I'm writing and then reading aloud the truth of my life in a circle of people. We hear echoes of our own experiences, threads that prompt our own memories, parallel lives in the voice of another. We share the sacred and profane, the mundane and unbelievable. We share our miseries, our joys, how we're falling apart or healing and coming back together We share our living memoir. Join me for writing how you really feel. It helps heal us all. Love, Valley (PS: I'm sharing a lot of rainbows right now because I need every octave of their healing vibration and unconditional love!)
1 like • 3d
Sorry - I just saw this ! I was in midst of sending postcards to voters. I guess I need to put alerts on !
16d •
What words are you using as your wand today?
I was recently introduced to the book "Your Word Is Your Wand" by Florence Skovel Shinn written in 1928. How perfect for us spellcasters and storytellers at Writing Fire---especially since my latest passion is collecting vines and sticks from the woods for making magic wands!! “Your word is your wand. The words you speak create your own destiny," writes FSS. I believe this to be true 100% even though I forget at least once nearly every single day 😂! Today I will use my words as my wand to say: All of the pain, suffering, and struggles of my past are absorbed and composted into the earth to bloom into powerful stories and a beautiful future. What words are you using as your wand today?? (Photo below of some of the Spirit Sticks + Magic Wands I've been making recently-- my Dad made the wand with the circle on top for me in my early 20's💘 💘)
3 likes • 15d
I’m trying to switch the words I’m using to/about my body from noticing and naming all the aches and pains and extra weight and so much discomfort to words of encouragement- words to acknowledge what it still does well, words to remind it that it has healed magnificently in the past. Words to cheer it on to build back strength and flexibility and ease I’m replacing the harmful magnifying glass that I’ve been peering through - enlarging the problems in my perception and having Drs look through the magnifying glass with me. I will choose my wand from my very giving trees - and maybe make one next time I’m in the ceramic studio. Lemme know if any of you ever wanna come over and make a wand - our ceramic studio is always open.
1 like • 14d
@Valley Jane I also make rattles - we can make wands and rattles !! Or wands that rattle !
16d •
My Generation
The Vietnam War changed my life, not that I went. Jeff Green was an early casualty. He was the son of my mother's close friend, Ann Green, and older brother of my friend, Marty Green. Jeff went into a bunker that had been tear-gassed. He had an allergic reaction and died. The bunker had been empty. I did not understand why he was there. Why was anyone there? It was barely in the news when I became disillusioned. I wore an anti-war button on my pea jacket. I was 19 and a sophomore in college. During those years my father worked for the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of the Army. My father told me that the war was never discussed over lunch at Army Mess No.1. The leadership in Saigon was full of corruption, Vietnamese generals who had been educated in France, even after it was no longer a colony. I was disillusioned with what was accepted as truth, with the unfairness of a military draft that could be avoided by going to college or failing the physical with bogus ailments. My college was half an hour from Grand Central Station. We went to Washington. We went to Draft Boards. We picketed and chanted. I was familiar with the Establishment because I had been brought up within it. When others went on about conspiracies and secret groups I knew that such they were unnecessary. Conspiracy is not needed when everyone agrees. I did not agree. I was disgusted. How could my father and his friends let so many young men go off to a war they had no business fighting. Our family was split over this. The wives in Washington hated the war, the fathers went to work. I repudiated the rationalizing. I wanted nothing to do with a life that accepted such moral compromise. Perhaps without the war I would have become a lawyer. My family is overflowing with them. Maybe I would have gone into politics. I had grown up among adults who wanted to serve their country. I saw how they ended up. I wanted to be a revolutionary. I had the critique down pat. I joined SDS when some Columbia students came to my college recruiting members.
3 likes • 14d
What a time to witness and learn from. I grew up in a civilian family in Hampton - surrounded by Air Force, Army and Navy families from all the bases in the area. I remember wearing the POW bracelets of my schoolmates fathers. And hearing their stories through their children’s tender perspectives. As I was in a family of all girls we were not under the threat of the draft - and my father was already near 60 years old and had served in earlier wars. I remember the coverage on our tvs. The first time the realities of war were showing up in our living rooms. Before that, it was from newsreels at the movie theaters. It was all so shocking and heartbreaking and disturbing and felt so senseless. And it was. And then to learn about it from the perspective of Wolfgang later on. I met him when he was just a few years back from Viet Nam. (Twenty years before we became the couple we are today) He was drafted two weeks after becoming a citizen. And he became a citizen in hopes of getting a student loan for college. His citizenship ship exam was oral and consisted of only three easy questions. His hours of studying had been for naught. They wanted his demographic. He got caught in the middle of all that- his draft notice arriving when he returned home from the weekend at Woodstock. He went from the place of propagating PEACE and LOVE to a bootcamp where they shaved his long hair and forced him to learn how to use a gun and shout “KILL KILL KILL”; he went kicking and screaming. He had tried to move to Canada before getting his citizenship but they wouldn’t let him stay. He didn’t have enough money. When he returned from Viet Nam he was spit on at the airport. He understood why they spit; the spitters didn’t understand that he had been forced to go. Two weeks after returning from Viet Nam the artillery hill he had been working and living - in the fumes of agent orange- was obliterated. I think about teenage me from that time and I think about the youth and what they are witnessing now. How will they respond? What is waking up in them in the midst of the current insanity?
18d •
What's HOT: Aug 31 - Sept 4!
Hello Writers... How are you all on this last day of August/ Monday? Just remember the acronym of FINE is Fucked up, Isecure, Neurotic, and Emotional! 😂 So, how are you REALLY? 👹 👿 👰 Personally I heard a quote by Maya Angelou this morning that really helped me take some beautiful baby steps in the direction of self-forgiveness (below) 💓🙏💓 ✍️HOWEVER you're doing this week, I'd like to invite you to join me for two special writing workshops: Conversations with the Goddess on Tuesday, 9/1 at 2 PM EST and Right Now I Am on Friday, 9/4 at 11 AM EST. Click on the link to add directly to your calendar and for the zoom link! Both of these workshops are designed so we can use our pens as tools to pull our unconscious into consciousness. Big, scary, tumultuous ,wonderful stuff! The stuff of transformation and healing,. 👋I'd also love to welcome two of our newest members to the Writing Fire community... @Jennifer Spurgeon and @Lisa Loving. So glad you're here with us to share your voice and stories! These HAWT writers shared their writing....enjoy the 🔥 ❤️🔥 @Erin N and @Susan Buniva shared BEAUTIFUL excerpts from the pieces they wrote in the Convos w/the Goddess class last week, that you can read right here! ❤️🔥 @Cate Fitt has postedseveral wonderful original pieces, including My Mother's Nightgowns and Reflections on Listening and Writing.
1 like • 15d
Aiming for Friday 🤞..going to set alarms for it now !
19d •
The Fuel of Feeling
One of the many things I love about my writing classes is that I don't have to always show up in a good mood! I just have to show up willing to tell the truth. I have found anger, confusion, and grief great motivators to write but so are hope, excitement, and joy. What are your favorite fuels for the writing fire? The Fuel of Feeling (Surrender Your Weapons: Writing to Heal by Valley Jane, 2017) We do not have to arrive at writing practice in the perfect mood or even a good mood. We can come to the page with every and any feeling we have. We can show up angry, grieving, jealous, sad, confused, exhausted. We don’t have to apologize for our feelings or explain them away. We can use them as fuel to drive our narrative forward, each feeling lending itself to a different kind of expression. I believe that when we write tired we are often more vulnerable and have less energy to put up our usual filmy walls of resistance. Anger can add force to our words while sorrow might soften them. Each emotion brings a different aspect of our lives and ourselves to the page. I have shown up to my notebook red hot with fury and doubled over in grief. I have entered the page confused, uncertain, unsure. Almost without fail, I emerge from my writing practice feeling differently than when I entered it. The physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual act of writing transmits and transforms emotion. The stories we write become carriers of those feelings, that, suffused into our words, can be felt by our reader. We know when we read something fueled by emotion that was born in the heart or the body as opposed to a wholly clinical academic piece pried from the head. Our bodies respond when we read words written with the fuel of feeling. We don’t have to turn away from the page because we aren’t in the right mood. Every mood we have has something different to say, another piece to add to our story.
2 likes • 15d
I always think that writing should be a late night thing- when all is quiet and no “shoulds” hollering from every corner. But lately I get too sleepy as soon as I start. That’s new for me. I am trying to find the new “time “ that works. It’ll probably end up at the other bookend - getting up an hour earlier and jumping right in after morning pages.
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Active 2d ago
Joined Jun 28, 2026