Alicia King Anderson has a Ph.D. in Mythological Studies and Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. Her dissertation on The Storyteller Archetype explores the responsibilities of storytellers. She was particularly struck by the healing functions of storytelling that were made very clear in her research. Her areas of interest include career pivot and transition, trauma, burnout, fairy tales (particularly fairy tale retellings), mythology retellings, as well as archetypal symbols such as the tarot and unicorns.
After nearly twenty years as an expert in organic search and digital marketing, Alicia is leveraging her experience as a marketer and a manager to help others navigate burnout in a novel way. She offers workshops, 1:1 coaching, as well as on-demand online courses in addition to a book on achieving lasting burnout recovery. She focuses upon an eco-psychological metaphor for the burnout cycle, and uses that as a roadmap for creating sustainable, lasting change following either professional burnout, autistic burnout, or both. This metaphor is how she successfully navigated her own long burnout recovery journey. Rooted in the natural world, the metaphor is beautiful and full of hope.
Beyond burnout, her own career transitions and pivots have given her a number of skills to be able to guide others through the process of finding work that is meaningful and fulfilling. She is proof that it’s possible to both follow your bliss and pay the bills, and she wants to guide others to do so.
An accomplished public speaker, her training and instruction style is collaborative, convivial, and memorable. Her teaching creates lasting change for students – whether she’s discussing complicated technological concepts or teaching a course on Morbid Anatomy about unicorns. Her wide array of courses offered through Morbid Anatomy circle around the idea that telling and retelling stories can offer paths for healing. As a long time student of information architecture and instructional design, she focuses on making her courses tactical and actionable.
She has scholarly chapters coming in two volumes by Vernon Press in 2024. She is currently editing a collection of essays called Advanced Unicorn Theory which will be published by McFarland Press in Spring 2025. She presented a paper at the American Folklore Society annual meeting in November 2024. She has also presented at the London Arts-Based Research Center conference “The Art of Storytelling: Archetypes in Focus,” and at the Progressive Connexions conference “Trauma, Shame, and Testimony.”
Alicia’s fiction has been published in anthologies by World Weaver Press, Improbable Press, Autonomous Press, Anxiety Press, No Bad Books Press, Alpha Mercs Press, and Flame Tree Press. She also has stories and articles in Parabola Magazine, Three Crows Magazine, and Coffin Bell Journal. She even has a poem in an upcoming collection from University of Calgary Press.
Alicia is a mythologist, storytelling expert, coach, and instructor based in the Land of Enchantment, where she lives with her cats and dog. A polyglot (English, Spanish, French, and German) and an accomplished photographer, she enjoys traveling.