Photo by Mary Chiaramontev
“As we write, we heal ourselves. As we share our stories, we heal each other. As we heal each other, we heal the world.”
With these words, local writer and teacher Valley Haggard describes her life’s work — guiding students through the process of sharing their stories and providing a platform for “fresh, engaging and high-quality storytelling.”
In December 2021, Haggard published her own storytelling as the latest issue of the quarterly anthology Unzipped. While some issues of Unzipped include writings on a particular theme by multiple authors, others, like Haggard’s, titled “There’s No Accounting for the Strangeness of Things,” are book-length projects by one author. Haggard developed “Unzipped” via the organization Life in 10 Minutes, through which she helps her students write their life stories 10 minutes at a time.
“There’s No Accounting for the Strangeness of Things,” follows her previous self-published books, “The Halfway House for Writers,” originally written in 2015, and its 2018 follow-up, “Surrender Your Weapons: Writing to Heal.”
Haggard started compiling over a decade’s worth of writings in 2020 after the death of her father, David Smith, to whom she dedicates her memoir. “I felt a surge of creative energy that carried me through,” Haggard says. “It was one of those things where you get up early and stay up late and just can't stop working.”
Haggard details a life characterized in early adulthood by struggles with addiction, difficult relationships and destructive choices; then in middle age she grapples with efforts to sustain a marriage, raise a son and support her parents in their declining health.
Her raw, unfiltered entries prove the adage that truth can be stranger than fiction. In one passage, she has traveled to Arkansas with Big Will, her then-fiance, whom she met while working as a cabin girl on a remote dude ranch in Colorado. Big Will is visiting his mother, and Haggard is staying alone with his father, Will Sr., who on more than one occasion invites Haggard into his king-size bed. One day, the elder Will places a severed buffalo head on a picnic table in front of the cabin. “The glassy eyes pull me and yank me in,” Haggard writes. “I know in the glare that it’s time to pack up and go.” And off she goes, soon finding a job on a cruise ship docked in Juneau, Alaska.
As she writes about some of the raw and vulnerable moments of her life, Haggard does so unapologetically. “I‘ve been doing a whole lot of therapy and any recovery work I‘ve been able to find for the last 23 years,” she says. “Doing all that work has taken the shame away from the things that I experienced, or put myself through, or opened myself up to by the way I behaved. I've really been able to find a lot of self-forgiveness.”
Scattered throughout her memoir is wisdom perhaps gleaned from that recovery work, as when she reflects on having had her first beer at age 13 and later raising a 13-year-old son: “Maybe the only way to win at tug-of-war is to stop pulling as hard as you can or drop the rope you never really had control over at all.”
When she was a child, Haggard says, she told her mother she wanted to become a famous reader, but in 2004, she began her path toward becoming a writer and teacher. That year, she started writing for Style Weekly, eventually becoming its full-time book editor. After getting laid off in 2008, Haggard founded Richmond Young Writers to encourage local youth to share their thoughts and experiences through creative writing, and then she began teaching adults at Black Swan Bookstore and Chop Suey Books.
In 2015, she developed Life in 10 Minutes, which emerged out of the 10-minute framework for creating life stories that she had been using in her classes. The organization provides writing classes and opportunities for students to share their work in an online literary magazine, the Life in 10 Minutes Project, as well as the Unzipped anthology.
Haggard says she published “There’s No Accounting for the Strangeness of Things” to show her students it was possible. “Writing and sharing and reading our stories,” she writes in the book, “allows us to process the past, ground in the present and move into the future, freer and more deeply woven into the life-giving, rich fabric of human life.”
Valley Haggard reads from her memoir, "There's No Accounting for the Strangeness of Things," as part of our online series "Writers in Residences." instagram.com/richmondmag
