down-to-earth permission to do things your way

Hi! I’m Megan,

and I partner with couples like you to design refreshingly authentic weddings in Maine. When I am not event planning, I’m a therapist—so, I totally understand the “people” side of working (and coordinating and celebrating) with people.

I think love is the coolest force in the world so, gathering all your loves in one place for a giant party is a process I love love love! While I know wedding planning can create #allthefeels I’ve been in the industry for more than 10 years—my chill is legendary, but I’ll also be the first one to rush in with my sleeves rolled up.

I am brave, affirming, grounded, and loving.

AND I’m unambivalent about the honor of hanging out with you and your family during some of the most enriched—and complex—months of your lives. Let’s chat about how we can team up—I’m SO happy for your happiness and so delighted to talk all about it!

  • Sarah

    “Megan is incredibly compassionate, creative, and organized. She was able to balance the big picture vision of what we were looking for with the small details that made the day stress-free and infinitely special.”

  • Coy

    “Working with Megan is a dream; she listens intently, asks poignant questions, and delivers way above what you expect!”

  • Jesse

    “Megan helped us turn our vision for our wedding into a thoughtfully planned and seamlessly executed event that our guests are still raving about years later!”

  • Monika

    “Megan made our wedding more than we could have hoped for. Her creativity and the thought and care that went into our planning conversations resulted in a beautiful event that felt truly reflective of us.”

  • Betsy

    “Megan brought her whole self—heart, brain, and soul—to create an event that truly reflected our love and the foundation of a marriage that we were laying. She was so much more than a wedding planner-confidant, advisor, and best of all, friend. She was there, steady and reassuring, in the times of joy and stress. We couldn’t have imagined our day without her!”

  • Andrew

    “Megan created magic. We had a clear vision of what we wanted our wedding to be, and Megan made it all happen, seemlessly, with clear communication, and with a huge heart. She surpassed our expectations, and found ways to save us money throughout the journey, which paid for her fees.”

Wedding Consultation + 60-Day Coordination

$6k-9k

I’ve been designing, planning, and coordinating weddings for more than a decade. I’ve figured out the sweet spot combo of services that meets the needs of the gumption-filled but professionally-occupied couples I work with most frequently.

It goes like this.

In the months leading up to the wedding, while you’re planning your event, we consult as needed. You have access to my years of learning (with a few wild stories!) and my network of relationships. At 60-days out, we trade roles. I galvanize the vendor team and handle the logistics. Throughout the era, you are able to conduct your own process together while also benefiting from my years of expertise and talent for discernment.

How it works!

Step #1

I ask you questions!

  • You bring me into your relationship and your vision for celebrating it. We also talk about your community: who makes it up, what it might need (…or expect or be looking forward to), how it might want to help, and, often tenderly, who won’t be able to be there. You help me understand not just what you might want to do during your wedding but also how you want to feel.

  • By the time you get to the point of chatting with me, you’ve answered a few of the most important questions, like “when?” and “where?” and “who?(!)”—but wedding planning is packed with questions that need answering and my favorite of these—and it’s a question I almost never ask as a therapist—is “why?”. It is usually very obvious to me why it’s you two—why you’ve chosen each other—but we talk a bit about why marriage itself and that helps bring me into the so-vital why of this giant beautiful logistical expensive complex exhilarating bash of a ritual. And that why helps us make all the rest of the decisions.

  • Decisions have meaning—relational, ethical, financial meaning. We work together to clarify how you want to prioritize your resources and your vision given what this event means to you and who your loved ones are.

Step #2

You ask me questions!

  • We build the vendor team; I help you decide who the professionals are who will best align with your values and can deliver on your vision. You ask me questions like, “What should we be asking our photographer?”

  • You check off tasks as you are able using, if you want, my client portal and Maine-specific planning recommendations.

  • You check in with me with questions, confusions, or a need for professional advocacy.

Step #3

I ask you questions (again)!

  • At 60-days out from the wedding, you pass the torch to me! I tidy loose ends with vendors; we talk through how they prefer to work in the weeks/days leading up to a wedding, what they need, and what questions they have. I share my own values about teamwork and commit to supporting their work however necessary; this builds trust and ensures that guests see vendors enjoying each other and the work. I pride myself on how often we leave these conversations laughing and excited for your wedding.

  • I identify the final touches that need doing—often you’ll have some of your own projects in the final days—and we arrange the hand-off of those tasks. I monitor the process and confirm remaining questions get answered according to prior vendor calls.

  • If I identify planning gaps, I leverage the galvanized vendor team in a collaborative manner to solve the problem. These are often the moments remind us why we all do this work—a wedding is greater than the sum of its parts and stretching beyond our own work to support others is rewarding.

  • Throughout this 60-day period, I drafting a master logistics document. Sometimes this is forty pages long, other times, it is three; regardless, it often maps the wedding weekend to the five minute interval. All vendor responsibilities are paralleled so the team understands our reliance on one another and you understand how we are working to bring the vision to fruition. This document is circulated among everyone in the ‘need-to-know’ circle and is usually greeted with a giant sigh of relief—the wedding is going to happen!

Step #4

No one asks you any questions!

  • While I’m often bopping around before dawn, all your vendors, in each their own roles, are completely consumed by the singular world of your wedding. Things fall silent around us; the day is here and we are making it happen.

  • Everyone has my cell phone. Texts fly. You can be as aware or unaware of this as you want.

  • It’s my job to anticipate snafus. And still wacky things happen. Ask me about the time a tent flooded out in a freak single-cloud, neighborhood-sized, overnight deluge that never showed up on the radar. (See Annie + Kenny’s wedding for how swimmingly that one turned out!) We plan with contingencies in mind. But I am a master “pivoter” and hiring me is as much an insurance policy for still-having-a-cool-wedding-no-matter-what as it is an investment in having the exact wedding of your dreams.

  • From unlocking your venue in the still of the morning to locking it up in the quiet of the night—and all the joy and revelry in between—I make the timeline happen so that you can have the time of your life!

Feeling overwhelmed and running out of time?

WEDDING RESCUE SERVICES

If you’re a few months out from your wedding and you’re feeling overwhelmed, I’m happy to join the team and help bring coherence to the chaos. I’ll also come with open-hearted emotional intelligence, a comfort with competing ideas, and a bunch of sturdy coping strategies.

$4-6K

Wedding Consultation

I’ve been supporting families in wedding planning for many years. I am happy to work out a batched hourly consultation arrangement with anyone seeking conversation with an expert event planner who is comfortable with family dynamics, inviting of competing emotions, and rejecting of wedding industry insanity.

  • In my household, when our dogs are being wacky, we’ve started saying to them: “You are so your own self!” And you know something that’s pretty true: we are all so our own selves around weddings. Intensity happens. It’s a wild phenomenon. But wedding planning is also a masterclass in collaboration and we all know how we feel about group projects. Part of my job as a wedding planner—and Monday through Friday as a therapist—is to help people navigate all the wacky wild family phenomenons that come up during the engagement era; I’m happy to help you navigate family membership with authentic fierce grace. You are SO your own self and I’m poised to help you celebrate that you’ve got a partner choosing exactly you for exactly your own self.

  • I hear people say all the time that they just want to be happy in life. And for sure, I wish that for all of us too. But I think the primacy that gets placed on happiness fails to account for how emotions are fleeting and more importantly, that emotions coexist. I am happy as I type this; so too am I sad and scared and surprised and proud and excited. I have all the emotions right now and I’m just sitting at my desk! Weddings are not merely about happiness—they are about life. And it makes sense to not just prepare for but embrace that weddings invite all emotions. And if you can anticipate emotions feeling overwhelming or notice that you have complex feelings about certain decisions throughout the planning process, it might help to talk through how you can navigate the planning process in the context of mixed emotions.

    *When so many people are present for a wedding, we are reminded also of those who are not. So grounded consultation about sadness alongside happiness can be especially helpful in the context of losses and absences.

  • Weddings are inherently about values. Obviously, it is positive when a critical core of values are shared within a partnership but this does not mean that all values, traditions, beliefs, orientations, histories, and biases will be—and certainly two families or two communities are bound to match fitfully with one another in some dimensions of culture, religion, identity. These can be heart-breaking rifts to attempt to bridge. And also: they can be breath-taking. I am comfortable stepping into cultural conflict with humility and non-judgement. Maybe this comes up around rehearsal dinner traditions or financial priorities. Maybe around the role of alcohol in celebration or choice of church over barn. Where it often comes up is in writing the ceremony. If having a facilitator for these explorations would feel fruitful, be in touch.

  • The wedding industry is not known for having inclusive, reflective messaging or priorities. For sure, the concept of a wedding within the industry is a bit of a White Western cultural monolith. Let’s stop.

    We don’t need to stop everything and stopping some stuff could still mean having the wedding on the cover of magazines, just with more intention, more awareness, more understanding of why we’re doing it. I totally participate in this industry and I understand why some things are the way they are—like I know it’s crazy expensive and I see all sides of that—but I have ultimately decided to stay in this industry precisely because there is so much meaning to be made. I’m moved and exhilarated by deconstructing the monolith. Tradition is poweful. We need it. It gives life meaning. AND. Let’s just say, I’m not wedded to it.