Kelly Anderson: Many People Told Me That I Couldn’t Write This Book
In this interview, author Kelly Anderson discusses the rewriting process of her debut novel, The Wild Beneath.
Dr. Kelly Anderson is an award-winning academic physician with fellowships in emergency medicine and HIV. She completed the Bookends Novel Fellowship (under Meg Wolitzer and Christina Baker Kline), the Gateless Writing Academy, and is a certified Gateless writing teacher. She led writing courses for over two thousand women inside her award-winning nonprofit, Understory, designed to bring doctors back to themselves and their instincts, and she built the clinical team at Felix Health to connect over a million Canadians with primary healthcare. Kelly is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto and has taught ethics, community and belonging for over a decade. She spent her childhood swimming the beaches of British Columbia, and now lives in Ontario with her husband and two boys. Follow her on Instagram.
In this interview, Kelly discusses the rewriting process of her debut novel, The Wild Beneath, her advice for other writers, and more.
Name: Kelly Anderson
Literary agent: Madeleine Milburn
Book title: The Wild Beneath
Publisher: Park Row
Release date: August 4, 2026
Genre/category: Literary fiction
Elevator pitch: The Wild Beneath follows a woman named Annie MacLeod, who was raised on a sailboat in the remote Pacific Northwest. When a tsunami strands her on shore, she finds a mysterious man in the wreckage who emits a humming sound only she can hear. It’s a love story and a myth, built for readers who loved Wild Dark Shore and The Time Traveler's Wife.
What prompted you to write this book?
When I started writing The Wild Beneath in 2019, I was quietly drowning inside my own life as a doctor. I looked “fine” and “normal” from the outside. Inside, I felt robotic and flat and like I’d somehow abandoned myself. I was pushing through shifts, working three jobs at once, booking clinic after clinic, slogging through emails and inboxes of lab results.
I never planned to write fiction. One winter morning, I was doing a three-point turn in my driveway. The sun was blindingly bright and I’d forgotten my sunglasses. I found myself imagining a story about metamorphosis. I think, in some way, I was looking for that kind of change in my own life.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
I rewrote this book entirely four times over five years. I had a sense of the story early on, but—coming from a medical background—I didn’t know how to write. My first draft was very basic. I subsequently inhaled several books about craft and was incredibly lucky to work with teachers that were willing to bear with me through revisions. After the third draft, I could tell something was still missing in the relationships between Annie, Walker, and Evan. I had to put the whole book aside until I knew how to fix the love triangle. It took eight months to figure out that one element. Once I rewrote the story the fourth time with the new ending, I knew it was ready enough to be pitched.
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
The editorial process was fascinating to watch. I didn’t realize that the biggest emotional punches could be created by taking things out rather than adding them in. Even after two substantive edits, we cut about 8,000 words in the final revision. Annie Chagnot, my editor at Park Row, is exceptionally good at knowing what to remove to give the reader the opportunity to feel something big on their own. I tend to overwrite all the emotion to begin with, just to get it on the page. But the beauty is then removing it and seeing that the scene can hold the feelings by itself.
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
I don’t think I “imagined” this whole story into being, because it arrived quite suddenly in 2019, almost fully formed. I wonder where stories actually come from. Do we make them, or do they make us? Most of the time, I show up to a blank page and have no idea or plan about what’s going to come out. I write by hand and try to keep my pen moving. One of my favorite writing teachers, Sarah Selecky, taught me that we don’t need to know how to write the story when we begin. We just need to show up consistently, with an open mind, and start. The story will teach us how it wants to be written.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
I love immersive love stories in vast, beautiful landscapes. It’s even better if the story has threads of magic that feel believable, as if they could happen in my own life. This is how I tried to imagine The Wild Beneath, and what I hope readers feel—an ocean world we can sink into and feel like the magic belongs to us.
Our daily lives can be noisy and busy. It’s so easy to be pulled into a kind of constant doing, where we live too much in that analytical, problem-solving part of the left brain. This book asks questions about who we really are and what we’re here for. There’s a quieter inner space we often lose touch with—and this story is a reminder we can come back to it.
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
Writing The Wild Beneath has felt, to me, like entering into a kind of agreement with this story. The more I showed up reliably—with discipline and perseverance and regularity—the more the story showed itself to me. It’s a bilateral relationship. Many people told me that I couldn’t write this book. They said it would be too hard and that I didn’t have the right training for it. The reason The Wild Beneath exists now is that I kept sitting down at my desk every single day. I wouldn’t give up on it, and it didn’t give up on me.
