For the next fifteen years, Tanya spent her professional life mentoring others, particularly visionaries, healers, actors, musicians, and other deep creatives, to write and perform their personal narratives. Her students have performed at repertory theaters across the U.S. and at fringe festivals worldwide, including New York, Toronto, Edinburgh, and beyond.

Tanya taught memoir writing at Santa Fe Secondary School, El Castillo Retirement Community, College of Santa Fe and United World College (Las Vegas, N.M.) between 2010-2017.

In 2010, she co-created a yearlong memoir program, Author It, with Candace Walsh, helping dozens write the first draft of their books. Earlier, in 2002, Tanya released The Cancer Monologue Project, an anthology featuring work from her students living with cancer. The project garnered national attention, with features in “O” Magazine, Rosie, Spirituality & Health, Backstage, Albuquerque Journal, Santa Fe New Mexican, The Dallas Morning News as well as being featured on multiple NPR stations, establishing her as a leader in the field of personal narrative work.

From this body of work, Tanya created and developed The Life Monologue Project, supporting individuals facing trauma and serious illness in writing and performing their stories on stage. She has collaborated with organizations such as Gilda’s Club, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Cabrini-Green Hospital, Ambercare Hospice, San Diego Repertory Theatre, and the New Mexico Cancer Center to create safe, transformative spaces for storytelling.

In 2020, while living at the foot of Black Mesa in rural New Mexico, Tanya formally codified Somatic Writing as a process and unique methodology integrating spoken word, writing, embodiment practices, land-based wisdom, and Writing with the Ancestors practices.

She continues to guide writers into deeper layers of truth by helping them access stories held in the body, land, and lineage.

In 2024, Tanya deepened her mentorship by training in Family Constellations (Hellinger work), adding this layer to her storytelling and memoir process. Through this training, she integrated her own ancestral inheritance of wounding and pain – she is both the descendent of colonizers and those colonised from English, French and Irish bloodlines. Tanya knew that these exiled ancestors lived inside her still, their stories unheard, unhealed and untold. When she could claim and embody multiple aspects of her lineage as her own, she was able to finally take her place in her family story. Without bypassing guilt or shame, she accessed deeper gifts she now shares with her community.

Her emergent process, Sober Magic, relates directly to what Rumi wrote when he said, “the rose’s rarest essence lives in the thorn.”

In 2021, she began a process of formally converting to Judaism, understanding that she had recognized and remembered herself as a “Jewish soul” when she was thirteen years old and was first became exposed to other Jewish people. As an adult, she encountered the woman who would become her spiritual mother, Dr. Jane Spielman. Jane helped facilitate Tanya’s conversion as an Anti-Zionist Jew, supporting her around all the complexity and joy inherent to that process.

These days, Tanya supports clients and community members at an intersection of writing, Ancestral healing and magic, knowing that when we share our stories while recovering at the root and reconnected to the land, we unlock radical personal and collective transformation. In turn, we then offer our hand to others to support their own liberation and integration.

Tanya’s essential mentors, teachers, friends and influences who have informed her life and work include Spalding Gray, Black Mesa and the Tewa land of the San del Ildefonso pueblo in Northern New Mexico, Octavia Butler, Alice Walker, Joy Harjo, Ramana Maharshi, Gangaji, Roshi Joan Halifax of Upaya, Santa Fe, Ariel Gore, Chloe S., Mary Gauthier, Natalie Goldberg, Perdita Finn, Dr. Martin Shaw, Rumi, Dr. Dwight Monnier, her maternal grandfather, Lorraine Monnier, her maternal grandmother, Rabbi Brant Rosen of Tzdek Chicago, Guadalupe, Aiden Watcher, Richard Vail, Bert Hellinger, Virginia Satir and the Zulu people of South Africa, the resilient Palestinian people of Gaza, James Baldwin, and many other beloved human and non-human Ancestors.