Guelph/Eramosa doctor releases debut novel
Doctor, mother, wife and now a published author, Kelly Anderson of Guelph/Eramosa is not short on accolades – her debut novel The Wild Beneath being the most recent.
Anderson has been a physician for 16 years, with fellowships in emergency medicine and HIV medicine and had never considered the possibility of writing a novel.
“I never planned to write a book… I had spent sort of almost a decade in the rinse and repeat of mostly emergency medicine, and I was feeling a bit separated from myself and who I really was as a person… I was very cut off from my creativity,” said Anderson.
The inspiration for the novel came unexpectedly in 2019, during a simple three-point turn in her driveway, where Anderson vividly imagined one of the book’s characters “undergoing a metamorphosis.”
“I saw this character standing on the beach… undergoing this metamorphosis, and at that point, I didn’t really realize that I needed metamorphosis in my life,” said Anderson.
“This three-point turn in my driveway was kind of the very first moment where I thought maybe I could do something different.”
“It took me six years to write the book, and I still practice medicine full time,” she continued. “Writing was sort of a bit of a rescue in my own life as a doctor.”
The novel follows Annie McCloud, a woman raised on a sailboat in the remote Pacific Northwest until a tsunami strands her on the shore.
In the wreckage, she finds a man who makes a mysterious humming sound that surprisingly only she can hear. Shortly after, the Coast Guard arrives to evacuate her and the humming man disappears.
Annie then goes on to build a “normal” life on land, but years later the same humming sound returns, forcing her to choose between “the safe, conventional life she’s created and the wild, ocean-centered life she left behind.”
“What the book is really about is how often, in the middle of our lives, we get some kind of wake-up call, like a knock on the door, where we realize maybe we’ve forgotten what we love the most,” said Anderson.
“Or we’ve forgotten our childhood dreams, or we’ve forgotten maybe what we most wanted to do, and we have to decide how far we’re willing to go to answer that call, or if we’re just going to stay in our mundane existence and not chase our goals and dreams.”
Anderson says the novel also acts as a love story between Annie and the ocean.
Officially published Aug. 4, The Wild Beneath is available for purchase “anywhere you can buy books” including Indigo, The Bookshelf in Guelph and copies will be available at the Eden Mills Writers Festival Sept. 20, where Anderson will be featured as a speaker from 3:30 to 4:30 at The Clearing.
The Eden Mills Writers Festival full schedule can be found at edenmillswritersfestival.ca/festival-sunday/festival-schedule.
