Ami McKay

Biographie

Born and raised in rural Indiana. Between cornfields and Interstate-65 she learned to tell tall tales, play the piano and drive a yellow 1972 VW Super-Beetle.

After an undergraduate degree in Music Education and graduate studies in musicology at Indiana State University, she moved to Chicago to teach music at an inner city high school for the arts.

While her days were focused on teaching music, she spent most of my nights filling notebooks and journals with short stories and ideas for novels. Trying to make her way in the Windy city as the single mother of a two-year-old, she kept her words to herself, having decided that a career in writing would have to wait. In the meantime, she kept a copy of a Time magazine article about Toni Morrison (along with her notebooks) hidden under her bed. She read the article whenever she felt down, and drew a large red circle around her recollection of her child spitting up on the manuscript of her first novel.

In 2000, she moved to Scots Bay, Nova Scotia (For the love of a good Canadian man.) The prolonged wait for her residency papers to be processed gave her plenty of time to embrace the writing life. (Thank-You Immigration Canada) After much prodding from her partner, she agreed to start sending my writing out into the world. In an effort to start small, shes choses the year 2000 as ‘the year of writing thank-you notes to people she doesn’t know.’ Her first attempt, led to an appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show.

Once people stopped looking at her like, “haven’t I seen you somewhere before?”, she took bigger steps towards the writing life. A summer workshop on “Writing for Radio” opened new doors and the opportunity to combine my love of music and sound with her passion for writing. This experience led to writing and producing documentaries for CBC radio as well as other freelance assignments. In 2003, an apprenticeship in the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia’s mentorship program gave her the excuse she needed to complete a first draft of The Birth House.

Now, every day is a writing day. There are still mounds of laundry to be done and bedtime stories to be read, but it’s all worth it when there’s a notebook waiting…on my desk, on the kitchen table…under the bed.