The Medicine of Story

I work with writers whose spiritual journey is inextricable from their writing life.

As a traditionally published and critically acclaimed memoirist, I combine sharp craft instruction and publishing industry savvy with a soul-led pedagogy and concrete spiritual tools—accompanying nonfiction writers through the underworld process of becoming who they need to be to birth the book the world needs most.

I believe the traumas we suffer comprise the first half of an initiation. To complete the initiation, those of us born as writers must alchemize these experiences—transforming them into the medicine our culture needs.

Doing this requires not only command of our craft, but the ability to recognize and move through the spiritual invitations of our process.

My clients confront nervous system activation, learn tools for embodiment, assess their energetics, face difficult truths about themselves, connect with spirit guides, move blocks somatically, remove negative entities, persevere through murky stretches of disorientation, and develop a mature relationship to illness, sexuality, and death despite society’s deep aversion.

I coined the term “trauma writing doula” in 2020 because “coaching” didn’t accurately summarize the nature of my client relationships.

Showing up to the writing process fully changes writers into clearer, braver, more vibrant versions of ourselves—imbuing the work with a different kind of potency.

I unmuzzle truth-tellers.

My clients have sold their books for $500k+, nabbed top agents, gotten into the best MFA programs, won elite contests, and gained entry into exclusive workshops. They’ve gone from completely stuck, to birthing whole books over the course of a couple years.

I’ve taught thousands of people in public and private universities, literary centers and libraries, in person and virtual, MFA and undergraduate, weekly and intensive, one-on-one and in big class settings. I’ve pivoted my teaching and client work businesses nine times now in response to the changing literary world and my own changing interests and skillsets.

What I’ve learned from all this: Only what’s in alignment can actually happen. While every human life matters—not every storyteller is meant to reach a wide audience, not every tale carries medicine, not everyone’s craft has fully matured, not every writer is bold enough to do the healing work that unlocks their potency, and not every story has reached its time.

Most importantly, I am not every writer’s alchemist.

I work with a limited number of clients at any given time, and only those who I believe are fully ready and fully aligned. I seek memoirists and essayists with the bravery and dedication to transform through our work together—distinctive voices that, with support, are ready to bloom—writers who will birth commercially-viable and artistically beautiful work full of the medicine our society needs.

I don’t teach beginner-level writing, mentor fiction projects, or edit one-off projects except from vetted past students.

My story:

Between 2009 and 2010, I survived repeated death initiations: from collapsing in a parking lot, to spending five months waiting for heart surgery afraid I would die, to undergoing my first medical technology implantation, to becoming septic and spending three weeks in the hospital feeling death move through me. My relationship to my own embodied knowing transformed through this process.

After I met an intuitive bodyworker at a hot spring in the spring of 2012, I found myself plunged into a process of spiritual development that seemed to operate beyond me. My excruciating experiences, it turned out, were not accidents.

In the 13 years since, I have lived in constant apprenticeship to “the old gods,” although I couldn’t have described it as such until recently. My training has taken me across the American southwest, to psychic school, reiki training, and the Arizona Trauma Institute; into mythosomatic qigong, hypnosis, angel work, and EMDR; and through sovereign pelvic touch, plant medicine ceremony, holotropic breathwork, somatic practice, and more.

As happens to many, these practices returned me to my sensitivity—and attracted the notice of the spirit world.

In 2022—after a brutal and quick mental health decline— I learned I had been living in a house with a malevolent entity. Despite moving out and receiving cleansings and exorcisms, I found myself repeatedly running into spirits in hotel rooms—beginning an era in which I was forced to trust my own read on the energy of places, spaces, and individuals, and to act out of the full sovereignty I had come to know. This transition proved impossible to separate from my work as a teacher and trauma writing doula, as the Universe increasingly brought me clients whose negative energetic attachments and snarly energetics impacted their writing process as much as trauma and craft. I began to perform clearings on my clients and, eventually, to channel for the public through my deep connection to the Trees.

I am currently enrolled in the Nordic School of Shamanism in Torvund, Norway.

I write about modern shamanism on my Substack, The Wild and Holy Moment.

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What is Thyrsus?

You may see the word Thyrsus listed on some of my business materials. But what is it?

A thyrsus is a wand topped with a lantern-like pinecone— carried, mythologically, by both Hanael (the Archangel of Venus) and the Greek God Bacchus. Hana—the angel of joy, pleasure, and nature—makes beauty from wreckage. She helps us find pleasure in all circumstances. She makes fruitful what was barren. Bacchus is the god of wine, god of the forest, fertile, honeyed, ecstatic, trafficking in epiphanies and subverting the dour oppression of authority. He is the dying-and-rising god. Born of Persephone, he is also known to be half of the Underworld—chthonic and wild with darkness.

And so the thyrsus is a light bringer in the midst of the wild dark. That is what we do here: We make beauty from wreckage. We cross the bridge from carcass to shyly budding garden. As a business name, Thyrsus is a process of restoring aliveness to the body after trauma. It is a way of working with writers that grows their voices down into the wet soil, connecting them with the nourishment they need to blossom. Thyrsus is the lantern casting light on the path; it is an erotic reunion between writers and their worlds.

Upcoming Workshops: