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 knew then that she wanted to be an artist and a writer when she grew up but got quite distracted by science. She earned a BSc in Biology from Concordia University, an MSc in Microbiology and Immunology from McGill University, and an MD 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 listen to thousands of hearts, deliver hundreds of babies, and be at the deathbed a number of times. Once, in the middle of the night in a tiny 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. In 2019, she moved with her family from Portland, Oregon to Lunenburg, Nova Scotia.

Her writing has appeared in Literary Arts’ The Archive Project, The Ravensperch, and The South Shore Review. She is the author and illustrator of two chapbooks with Lunenburg’s Little Books Collective. She hopes, one day, to finish her novel. When she needs a break from writing she turns to her artwork. She learned the basics of printmaking from a course at Portland Community College, but is mostly self-taught. Sometimes her writing inspires her artwork and sometimes her artwork informs her writing. Sometimes, she gets up early just to watch the sunrise.