story : the spiritual storytelling course
a six week interactive course to help you unearth your story safely through a guided journey of self discovery and compassionate community.
Sometimes the things that have happened to you get stuck inside of you. Your memories, experiences, and emotions get tangled up and you want to share what you’ve been through, but you don’t know where to start.
You’re stuck in your story and you want to get it out.
Story is a six week interactive writing course that will help sort through your experiences and craft your story in a way that honors who you are and what you’ve been through. Our stories don’t start when something bad happens to us and they don’t end when things get better.
Most of our stories don’t tie up with pretty bows, but even the stories with no clear beginning and no clear ending need telling.
Story will help you tell your story.
As you connect deeper to the story inside of you, you’ll also connect with other writers and storytellers doing the same thing. We’ll help each other discover things that are hidden deeply, draw them out, honor them, and order them into a story you can tell confidently.
Story is the primary way in which God has revealed himself to us. It’s how we share our lives, how we connect, and how we heal.
You have a story.
You should tell it.
WHAT’S INCLUDED :
group zoom calls :
Each week, we’ll meet on zoom to write together, discuss that week’s writing challenges, encourage each other, and share what we’ve been working on. (This is not a critical writing course, so we won’t be correcting each other or offering advice or feedback, just listening, encouraging, and celebrating each other’s journey.)
60 page digital workbook :
When you purchase the course, you’ll receive a digital workbook in your email. The workbook is split into six modules, each module packed with exercises to help you extract your story from the corners of your heart. Each section has a spiritual element for reflection, a unique writing exercise each week, and shadow work journaling prompts. You’ll also receive instructions on how to print and bind your workbook, if you prefer to hold the workbook in your hands.
private discord channel.
Your welcome email will have a link to join our private discord channel. This is where we’ll connect during the week, share ideas, ask questions, and connect with each other. (You’ll need to download the discord app.)
DATES : August 21 - October 2
COST : $149
registration closes on August 20th unless cap is reached first.
Meet Your Guide :
Your course will be facilitated by Kristen LaValley - a gifted writer who has been working on her craft since she could hold a pencil. She specializes in creative nonfiction and has been writing and sharing about her life online for ten years. She recently signed a two book deal with Tyndale and writes regularly on her popular substack blog, Things I’m Thinking About.
The vulnerability and honesty in which Kristen shares her own stories creates safe spaces for others to do the same. The communities she creates are welcoming and kind and you can be confident that your story will be safe in this circle.
Kristen has completed training with Voices from Inside, a non-profit that teaches writing to women who are currently or formerly incarcerated. This course is heavily influenced by the method taught in these trainings — the Amherst Writers and Artists method.
Take a sneak peek at the course below.
THE COMMUNITY
Each week, we see each other face to face on an interactive zoom call. All storytellers are invited to share, offer encouraging feedback, ask questions, and engage with each other and with the content. When we aren’t face to face on zoom, we’re in the private discord channel, encouraging each other, celebrating each other’s milestones, sharing our writing, and discussing each week’s course work. The discord channel remains open and active forever so that we can stay connected.
What Story Alumni Are Saying :
“I enrolled in the Story course to jumpstart my writing, as I’d stopped a few years ago. I expected prompts, writing, and awkward Zoom sessions. But what I found was courage, freedom, and a surprise sense of community. I found permission to let go of perfectionism and proper mechanics in order to just allow the words and thoughts to escape from heart to paper. There was more encouragement and safety from the group than I anticipated, and I not only wrote more than I thought I would, but I fell hard in love with some writing tools I’ve historically been afraid of or believed I didn’t have the skill for - like poetry. I cannot overstate how helpful and meaningful this course experience has been, and I 10/10 recommend. Kristen is accessible, real, relatable, and wise, and she leads this very well-thought-out course with compassion, grace, and valuable experience. I am changed.”
- Angela
At the start of 2023, I set out to focus on myself. The past two years or so, I was on a rollercoaster of finishing graduate school, taking my social work licensure exam, and with COVID and politics and church - I was growing exhausted. So 2023 came and I realized where I was and where I wanted to be. I wanted to be unafraid and unashamed of who I am. Someone who does not hide. I support and encourage students in all their endeavors, and I wanted to be able to believe in myself too.
In April 2023, I got an email about Kristen LaValley’s story course. Story had gotten my attention because it was simply about writing. Story is not about how to get published or how to market your story; Story is simply how to process and tell your story. Those six weeks felt too short, but also too long. Raw and real emotions and feelings were presented in each zoom call, it was close and intimate as we discover new ways of releasing the story within us in a safe space.
- Elizabeth
Take a look at some of the writing penned by story enrollees (storytellers) during the course.
dear body,
I want to love you
I long to honor you
I wish I didn’t feel betrayed by you
But I do
Life has caused you so much pain
and distress
and now you hurt
all the time
Decades of high cortisol has
stuffed your edges
pushing them outwards
trying to make space
for all you’ve seen
and felt and experienced.
I’ve cut you
and now your landscape
Is scarred with lines of hurt
and fear and misdirected rage.
I’ve made you keep secrets
too terrible to keep
too terrible to tell
and now you’re weighed down by it all.
You’ve been starved and underfed
so many years
and now you cling to everything
and why wouldn’t you?
You are honestly are a marvel
a repository of so much bad
mine and others
and so much good
mine and others
and yet I feel disdain
and grief
because mostly
I still just see
how you’ve responded to
all i’ve done
and failed to do
I see genetics i can’t control
I see choices i regret or perceive I shouldn’t have made
I hear people’s comments about bodies like you
their phobias and biases
I feel like every Before picture I regularly see
Oh, to see you as you really are
The one that endured
The one that carried me through all of it
and carries me still
The one that carried and nurtured my children
The one that’s healed every scrape, bruise, and sore throat
The wonder that survived
the unsurvivable
The miracle
......You
Anonymous
untitled.
Words have laid dormant in my mind
Taking up space, taking up room
But were lost on the way out.
Strangers will nod, confusion glitter in their eyes
Schoolchildren will whisper in my vicinity
I sought the shelter of the written page
Until that fateful day,
Standing thirteen and tall,
Reading out loud words of my creation.
My voice was heard
A new language was found
I shrunk away from spoken platform,
Hearing the ghosts of my past,
I pray for an Aaron to speak for me
No Aaron has yet to come,
Leaving me a Moses without an Aaron.
Leaving me with a burning question within,
A question I wish to ignore:
“Am I going to hide behind the screen,
Or bring the written word to life?”
- Elizabeth
glorious ruin.
I am a glorious ruin.
I was built by a majestic builder
Who carefully selected each marble and stone
And lay them with purpose and intentional precision. Expertly, he built me.
Proudly, he observed me.
Exhaling, he called me good.
And then the marksmen came.
They steadied their bows
And aimed with intention.
Stone by stone, I crumbled
Until I was little more than dust
As I lay here in the ashes of all that I was,
I hear the footsteps of the builder.
I feel his tears, hot against the dust,
As he grieves what was done to his work.
He kneels in the rubble that was
Once beautiful stone
His tears soak the ground
And he begins to mold the dirt in his hands.
What was ruined is still good.
He is starting over.
He reshapes.
He rebuilds.
His tears slowly turn to laughter.
Until he is dancing around
What’s left of me.
I am not what I was.
And I never will be.
I’m a glorious ruin.
And he is dancing around me.
- Kristen