Sharon Blackie offers fairy tales as “soul-food”

In an era defined by fracturing systems and growing uncertainty, many women feel ungrounded. Over the years, Dr. Sharon Blackie—an internationally bestselling author, psychologist, and mythologist—has inspired women to reclaim their inner narratives. Celebrated for titles such as If Women Rose Rooted and Hagitude, Blackie returns with her seventh book, Ripening: Why Women Need Fairy Tales Now, which she also narrates.

Blackie argues that the antidote to our modern malaise lies hidden within ancient European folklore. Stripping away the sanitised tropes of Disneyfied, people-pleasing princesses, she uncovers the original, gritty heroines passed down by our peasant ancestors. These protagonists are not passive victims. Rather, they are fierce, savvy, and deeply resourceful women who navigate danger with sharp instincts and immense inner strength.

Blending depth psychology with cultural history, Ripening serves as an empowering field guide for personal transformation and thriving through life's natural transitions. Here, she's answered a few of our questions on how we can use the ancient magic of storytelling to write our own futures.

Jerry Portwood: For listeners who feel disconnected from folklore, what is the first step in “living into” a story? Is it a matter of intellectual study, or do you believe it requires a physical re-engagement with the natural world, as suggested in your earlier books?

Sharon Blackie: For me, it’s actually not about intellectual study at all. It’s about letting the images in the story go to work on you. What most people carry with them from a memorable fairy tale is a vivid image: a pair of red shoes you can’t remove that want to dance you to death, or a stolen sealskin which means you can’t return to your natural element. And so we have to turn off our rational brain, stop asking ourselves what it all "means," resist the temptation to interpret everything that happens in a literal fashion, and lose ourselves in the power and magic of our imagination.

In If Women Rose Rooted, you focused on women reclaiming their place in the landscape. How does the fairy-tale wisdom in Ripening—which you describe as "soul-food" that offers "unimagined inner resources”—evolve that journey for women who are now entering their "harvest years," or midlife?

At the heart of all fairy tales is transformation, and midlife is nothing if not a time of intense and unavoidable transformation—especially for women, with all the hormonal mayhem that happens along in perimenopause. Many of the fairy tales that are relevant to this time of life reflect that: They’re stories of shapeshifting into wilder forms that lead us back to the intuitive, instinctual wisdom of the body as well as a sense of deeper belonging to the natural world of which we’re a part. In Ripening, I describe it as the Wild Woman archetype rising up in us at this time of life.

Many of the heroines you highlight are resourceful, brave, and savvy rather than passive. How can listeners use these darker, more complex stories to transform personal trauma into a narrative of agency without falling into the "toxic positivity" trap?

It’s actually quite hard to see fairy tales through a toxic positivity lens, because these heroines rarely win through just the wave of a magic wand or the intervention of a handsome prince who clears up the mess for them and makes everything all right again. They always have to put in a lot of hard work, forge meaningful relationships with the most unlikely and sometimes the tricksiest of beings, and pass tests that verge on the actively existential.

When you find yourself face to face with the giant who skinned your older sisters, or the wife-killing, knife-wielding, blue-bearded husband who has cornered you in the one bloody room he forbade you to enter, you’re not going to be able to just close your eyes, whistle a happy tune, and hope it all goes away. Very few fairy-tale heroines have an easy ride, and that’s why these stories are so powerful: They reflect the often dangerous realities of our lives. They hold up the skills and qualities of character that we need to acquire to transcend trauma. The transformation required is real and deep.

You narrate your audiobooks yourself. Since fairy tales were originally an oral tradition passed from woman to woman, how does the act of speaking these stories change your relationship to them compared to writing them down?

In Ripening, I do encourage people to tell these stories to each other, rather than just reading them. The spoken word is powerful, which is why in so many mythologies, a word or a phrase can conjure an entire world into existence. As a writer, I have an enormous respect for words on the page, but the spoken word offers up a multisensory experience that lands in the body as well as the head, and it can bring a narrative to life in a quite different but also quite complementary way. The oral tradition is more dynamic, more fluid, more playful.

As a psychologist, you use these stories to help people rewrite their personal narratives. Do you think the immersive, private nature of listening to your voice makes the "soul-work" of Ripening feel more like a one-on-one therapeutic session than reading a physical book?

Ripening is definitely no substitute for therapy, but I hope the sense of intimacy and of being "held," seen, and understood that can be experienced in therapeutic settings will carry through into readers’ listening spaces.

You’ve advised that we should let the vivid imagery of fairy tales "work on us" rather than immediately interpreting them. For audiobook listeners who are often multitasking (walking, driving, doing chores), how can they create the mental stillness required to let these audio-images truly land?

For me, the process of letting images go to work on us is more about immersing ourselves in the power of the original stories, rather than just in me talking about them. And for that to happen, you really do need to focus in on them without distraction. Simply by paying attention to that one thing, and that one thing only. Allowing yourself to become lost in the story, in order to be found again—and to emerge, perhaps clothed in a gown of sunlight, moonlight, or starlight. Or a cloak made of all kinds of fur, if that better reflects your own unique moment of revelation.

Finally, since much of your work is about our connection to the land and the "power of place speaking," I’m curious if you recommend we take our listening of Ripening into specific environments to enhance the "mythic imagination" while we listen? If I can’t find a dark wood or a local wild space, do you have any other suggestions?

There’s magic everywhere if you choose to look for it—alive and thriving even under concrete city streets and in all the determined "weeds" that spring up in the cracks between bricks and stones—and I’d say that any fairy tale benefits from being encountered in the outside world, either urban or rural. The stories that I’m working with in Ripening are those which emerge directly out of peasant culture as expressed through the oral tradition, not the more careful, confected products of the intellectual, middle- and upper-class salon culture from which literary fairy tales emerged. They’re wild at heart, and they ask that we rise up to meet them in a similar spirit.