ABOUT ME
About Alicia M. Rodriguez | Writer in Portugal's Algarve
I’m a writer based in southern Portugal's Algarve region. I’m the author of four books: the award-winning memoir The Shaman's Wife: A Mystical Journey of Surrender and Self-Discovery; the poetry collection Between Root and Sky: Poetry on Love, Loss and Longing; Everyday Epiphanies: Uncovering Wisdom in Ordinary Moments; and Manage Your Life Before Life Manages You: More Joy and Less Stress in 365 Days. I publish essays, poems, and audio readings in a free Substack, also called Between Root and Sky.
I Never Planned This Life
I live in a cliff-top village in southern Portugal, on the edge of Europe, where the Atlantic meets limestone and the almond trees bloom white in January when everything else is still winter.
I did not come here with a plan. I came because I had spent decades building a life that made sense on paper — corporate leadership, consulting, the addiction to achievement — and one day I noticed I could not feel myself inside it anymore. Not broken. Not in crisis. Just absent from my own life in a way that no amount of success could explain or fix.
So I left.
I followed love and instinct into the Ecuadorian rainforest, into the world of shamanic tradition and the Pacific coast and a partnership that would reshape everything I understood about surrender. That story became my memoir, The Shaman's Wife: A Mystical Journey of Surrender and Self-Discovery — an award-winning memoir about what happens when you surrender your agency to another then fight to reclaim your life, finally listening to your truth.
Portugal was the next listening. The Algarve gave me cliffs and ocean and silence. It gave me the room to hear my own voice again — not the professional voice, not the accomplished voice, but the one underneath all of it. The one that had been writing in journals for years, waiting to be taken seriously.
I took it seriously. I started writing in earnest. And publishing.
What I do now
I write. That is the simplest way to say it, and the truest.
I write essays and poems about thresholds — the space between who we were and who we are becoming. About what it means to leave a life that looked right and walk, without a map, toward one that feels true. About Portugal, my place of belonging now, and the way a place can crack you open if you let it. About grief and renewal and the particular quality of attention that arises when you stop performing your life and start inhabiting it.
My “journal” is called Between Root and Sky, named after my book of poetry. It lives on Substack. It’s free. It arrives when it is ready — not on a schedule, but when something is alive enough to share. If you want to know my work, start there.
I have written four books.
The Shaman's Wife is a memoir of love, adventure, and the wisdom forged in fire on the long road back to the self.
Between Root and Sky is a collection of seventy-seven poems on love, loss, and longing — in three movements called Thresholds, The Unraveling, and Returning.
Everyday Epiphanies offers essays on discovering wisdom in ordinary moments.
Manage Your Life Before Life Manages You is a year of daily reflections for living with greater joy and less stress.
Once a year, I hold a small writing retreat in the Algarve — in the landscape the essays come from. Not more than ten people. A week of writing, walking, eating together, and being quiet in a place that teaches you something about staying and about letting go.
Three times a year, I open The Correspondence — a season of letters exchanged with five people over three months. No calls. No video. Just the slow, deliberate act of writing to each other about what is true. A physical card or letter arrives the old fashioned way. It is the most intimate thing I offer, and the closest to the way I believe real conversation works — on paper, in the space between sending and receiving.
I am not a coach. I am not a therapist. I don’t offer programs, frameworks, or steps. That was a past life.
I am a writer who lives on the coast of Portugal and shares what that life teaches her. People who are moved by the writing come closer. Some subscribe. Some come to the retreat. Some write letters. Most simply read — and that is enough.
That is, in fact, the whole point.
THESE THINGS HAVE SHAPED MY PERSPECTIVE AND BROUGHT ME INSIGHT AND WISDOM
Key experiences in your life shape your perspective – and your story. After all, we are all made up of stories.
◐ Growing up as a daughter of Colombian immigrants, feeling like an outsider, and then observing and writing about life from this different perspective
◐ Being a woman business leader in a male-dominated industry
◐ Learning with shamans in the Andes and on the coast of Ecuador
◐ Living in six countries and traveling to four continents
◐ Love. And Loss. And Renewal.
◐ Working with literally thousands of women to help them lead authentically and rewrite the narratives of their lives