Ami McKay sits in her sun-drenched dining room in Scots Bay, sipping tea while monitoring the chocolate chip cookies she is baking for her youngest son who is away at university in Montreal.
The international bestselling author of The Birth House, The Virgin Cure, The Witches of New York and Daughter of Family G exudes pure joy as she talks about her writing, her family, her community and her life.
The house where McKay and her husband Ian live is the original Birth House and inspiration for her first novel. The couple purchased the house 20 years ago and knew nothing of its particular magic.
While pregnant with her second child, McKay made inquiries about midwifery in the area and learned about Mrs. E. Rebecca Steele, a midwife who once lived in their home. She began collecting stories from women in the community who remembered Steele, some of whom were delivered by her. The small room off McKay’s kitchen which now houses a piano was the birthing room.
McKay grew up in the American midwest, surrounded by music. She earned a masters degree in musicology at Indiana State University and never thought seriously about becoming a writer, despite being a voracious reader.
“My first backpack was so that I could climb trees and read,” says McKay. “But I always wanted to be Jo March (the heroine from Little Women, her mother’s favourite book).”
“I am such a believer in story and the power of it,” says McKay. “I’ve seen it work magic in my life so many times.”
Magic might account for McKay having met her husband. While working on her masters thesis, she travelled to Toronto for research. Joining friends for dinner one evening, the men regaled her with tongue-in-cheek suggestions about how best to woo a woman. McKay laughed good-naturedly until one guest began to recite Byron’s She Walks in Beauty. What no one knew at the time was that years earlier, a 16-year-old McKay had scribbled in a notebook that if anyone ever recited that poem to her, he would become her soulmate.
Five years and much correspondence later (her “poet” had moved to Nova Scotia to attend Acadia University), McKay visited for the first time. After a long weekend together the two were engaged and married within months.
While pregnant, McKay decided, on a whim, to take a CBC writing-for-radio workshop. “It was very addictive and I just loved it”, says McKay. She met with veteran radio documentary producer Dick Miller and began to do freelance radio work.
The Birth House was one such documentary, but McKay couldn’t shake the story and “that’s when I started writing the novel. Ian would watch the baby while I wrote and I’d write while the baby napped, any spare moment I could find. And it kind of came together over the course of a few years.”
A mentorship through the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia followed and the book won runner-up in The Atlantic Writer competition. McKay’s mentor suggested she look for a literary agent and McKay was taken under the wing of Toronto’s Helen Heller.
After nine months of edits by McKay, Heller sold the book to publisher Diane Martin at Knopf. Knopf in turn chose The Birth House as its new face of fiction by a debut novelist for their 10th anniversary. The rest is history and hard work.
McKay stresses that you need to “write what you’re closely connected to, especially with a novel because you’re in it for the long haul.”
The Virgin Cure was inspired by her great-great-maternal grandmother, one of the first female physicians in New York City in the 1870s.
“Her thesis was about syphilis and that’s when I uncovered this horrible myth of the virgin cure, that men believed they could be cured if they had sex with a virgin.”
McKay’s protagonist, Moth, jumped into the pages of The Witches of New York as Adelaide Thom.
McKay enjoys a strong working relationship with her book designer Kelly Hill and says, “I’d been very inspired by Carol Shields and The Stone Diaries. I took a lot of cues from her. [Kelly and I] included these faux advertisements that I had made within the confines of The Birth House, and recipes, excerpts from the midwives’ journals. It was just a dream experience.”
When McKay turned 49 her focus switched.
“I wondered if someone told me I can’t write anymore, what is the one story I’d feel terrible I hadn’t told? It shocked me that it was a memoir.”
The Daughter of Family G is the power of story that actually caused my family to persevere,” says McKay.
“So here I am, someone who’s always been connected to family genealogy and history, finding a story between the leaves of our family tree.”
TV SERIES
Omnifilm Entertainment of Vancouver owns the rights to The Birth House and has hired writers Sherry White (Maudie) and Kerri MacDonald (Frontier and Republic of Doyle) to develop a television series.
By Ami McKay:
Novels:
The Birth House
The Virgin Cure
The Witches of New York
Novella:
Half Spent was the Night
Memoir:
Daughter of Family G
Plays:
Jerome: the Historical Spectacle
Nothing Less!
The Hours Turn to Nothing
