Photo credit: Tom Dietz

Photo credit: Tom Dietz

Vanessa McKiel was born in London, England and grew up on a farm near Montreal, Canada. She wrote and illustrated her first book at the age of nine. She decided to be a writer when she grew up but got quite distracted by science. She earned a Bachelor of Science in Biology from Concordia University, a Master of science in Microbiology and Immunology from McGill University, and a Medical Degree from the University of Calgary. She completed her family medicine training in Portland, Oregon and worked as a family doctor for 16 years.

She was privileged to deliver hundreds of babies, remove thousands of warts, listen to millions of hearts, and be at the deathbed a number of times. Once, in the middle of the night in a tiny, rural emergency room, she had to convince a policeman that the bones he’d found were, in fact, not human. And when, some time later, a patient told her that they’d been born in an iron lung, Vanessa realized she was more interested in people’s stories than their ailments. She retired from medicine in 2016 and finally started writing.

Her writing has appeared in Literary Arts’ The Archive Project, The Ravensperch, and The South Shore Review. She took a Writing the Novel course through Portland’s Literary Arts and began working on a novel. To make it more challenging, she downsized her home, packed everything up, and moved her family from Portland, Oregon to Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, where she continues to work on her novel. When she needs a break from writing she turns to her artwork. Sometimes she gets up early just to watch the sunrise.