Night Flights

Valerie Johns is a Los Angeles-based psychotherapist, poet, and author whose work lives at the intersection of deep healing, lyrical prose, and the life of the unconscious. For more than thirty-five years she has accompanied others through their most formative wounds — in the consulting room, in the classroom, and increasingly, on the page. Her debut poetic memoir, Ashes in the Milk, traces the long arc of recovery from pre-verbal and early childhood trauma through adolescence and adult life, arriving finally at the hard-won territory of integration and voice. Structured in stanzas rather than chapters — a formal choice as clinical as it is artistic — the book mirrors the way trauma actually lives in the body: in fragments, in silences, in the connective tissue that goes missing before we have words for its absence. Jim Cirigliano called it "a poem that reads like a novel." Blurbs came from Kevin Nealon, Christina McDowell — whose own memoir ran in the New York Times — and the poet and psychologist Anita Barrows, translator of Rilke's Book of Hours. Readers describe finishing it and immediately reaching for someone they knew was carrying something unspoken. Her second book, Night Flights, forthcoming in June 2026, is dream poetry — the luxurious knowing of the deepest selves without fear. Where Ashes in the Milk was the descent, the reckoning, the finding of language for what preceded language, Night Flights is what becomes possible on the other side: the self no longer excavating but inhabiting, moving freely through the interior landscape that dreamwork opens. Together the two books form a complete arc — wound and emergence, excavation and flight. Valerie's writing life began in second grade, when her teacher Mrs. Best set her first poem to music and the whole class sang it. That early encounter with the power of authentic voice never left her. She went on to study with Jack Grapes as one of his first students in The Method — a practice that distills the tools of method acting for writers, asking them to use the same skills an actor uses to become a character in order to become the work itself, to locate writing not in craft alone but in genuine somatic and emotional truth. She later served as Poet in Residence at Pacific Palisades Elementary School, where she taught children The Method, published their work, and held poetry readings — giving young writers the same experience she had been given: the discovery that their authentic voice was already there, waiting. As a clinician, Valerie holds a master's degree in clinical psychology and is trained in hypnosis, dreamtending, and mindbody therapies. She served as an adjunct professor at Antioch University Los Angeles for twelve years, teaching the next generation of therapists in the tradition of depth apsychology. Her private practice has been a constant through more than three decades of her own transformation — she has sat with others in their darkness even as she was finding her own way through. That way through had many passages. Recovery beginning in 1985 brought her out of the free-spirited and often chaotic years of the 1970s and early 1980s and into the slower, more exacting work of self-knowledge. Buddhist-informed psychotherapy arrived early in her clinical training and never left — Jizo meditation, with its particular tenderness toward those who are lost or in transition, became a sustaining practice. Dreamtending, rooted in the Jungian tradition of Stephen Aizenstadt, gave her a method for working with the unconscious that was neither purely analytical nor purely intuitive but alive to image, to body, to the dreaming mind's own intelligence. During the pandemic, a dream journal she began grew and grew until it had become, without her fully intending it, the foundation of both books. She has described the writing as arriving not only from the mind but through it — through fascia work, through the journal, through years of sitting with what could not yet be said.