The Wild Beneath, a story of transformation, loning and our connection to nature. A debut novel by Kelly Anderson sharing her own lived experiences, the interconnectedness of storytelling and medicine, weaving in a love story set against the beautiful landscape of the wild Pacific Northwest. Today, we sat down with Kelly to learn more about her story.
Tell us a little bit about yourself.
I’m a writer and physician living in Guelph, Ontario. I’ve spent my medical career working in inner-city health and across rural and remote emergency departments in Canada.
I never planned to write fiction, but the idea for The Wild Beneath found me in 2019 while I was quietly drowning inside my own life. Everything appeared “normal” on the outside — I was proficient at work and looked successful and happy. Inside, I felt disconnected and flat and like I’d somehow abandoned myself.
I was doing a three-point turn in my driveway that winter. The snow was blinding, and I’d forgotten my sunglasses. An ocean image from The Wild Beneath arrived, fully-formed, along with the thought that as people, we can turn into other things. Metamorphosis.
My writing explores the tension between modernity and the deeper parts of ourselves we risk abandoning when our lives get too mechanical. I like to weave those ideas into love stories — especially ones that take place in vast, wild places.
As a physician who has worked in inner-city and remote emergency medicine, did your work with patients shape how you wrote Annie’s emotional world?
Medicine and writing feel like similar work, in that both doctors and writers care deeply about understanding people. In medicine, we are privileged to see the most unpolished, vulnerable versions of our patients—and doctoring, when done correctly, is mostly about listening to them. In small exam rooms and emergency department bays, I’ve heard similar things over and over. Patients might arrive with the flu or a broken collarbone, but there are always similar themes in the stories underneath. People told me they felt sad and disconnected from themselves. They felt exhausted. The world was moving too fast. I agreed with them. Annie grew out of that emotional landscape. She became a way for me to explore freedom, intuition, longing, and the possibility of transformation. Writing Annie’s story was a way of imagining a different life for her — and eventually, I changed my own life, too.
The novel is described as being about “the ancient bonds that tie us all to the natural world.” Do you think these bonds are ruptured or supported in this day and age?
In my teens and early twenties, I would wander the beaches of southern British Columbia and think to myself: Everything is okay because the ocean is here. I believed it. I might still believe it. The ocean has always felt alive and comforting and mysterious to me.
As adults, our lives can get noisy and busy, filled with Zoom meetings and folding laundry. Our phones ping constantly, and we’re drowning in our email. We spend less time outside, more time in our left brains. We often feel like something is missing, but can’t name what it is.
I’m intrigued when I read the work of naturalists, who frequently refer to mystical experiences after prolonged periods of time outside. There is so much we don’t know about the wild. In botany research, we’re learning that plants have memory and can recognize kin, even if they don’t have “brains”. Intelligence exists in many forms and places. The deep ocean is one of the least understood places on Earth; vast regions of it remain unseen by human eyes. It’s enlivening to feel into all the parts of nature we don’t understand yet. Our world becomes fuller when we allow that mystery to exist; when we experience the wonder inside it. Even more simply, we know that time in nature has extensively proven benefits for mental health. Our bonds with nature — and our ability to feel more and better in the wild — are not severed. I think they’re still there underneath our to-do lists, waiting for us to go outside again.
Growing up in BC must have had an impact on your thought processes and connection to nature. How much of Annie’s relationship with the ocean is your own?
When I was little, I spent my mornings at the beach searching for hermit crabs in tide pools with my grandmother in British Columbia. I lived in my bathing suits and spent most of my time outside. I was constantly in the ocean or writing stories about the ocean. I think those landscapes shaped the architecture of my imagination very early.
I wanted Hale’s Landing to feel as real as possible, so readers could fall for the landscape in the same way I fall head-over-heels for the Pacific Northwest each time I’m there. The trees and water there feel primordial and wordless in a way that awes me. I have so much difficulty fully describing that awe that I had to write a whole book about it.
What do you hope a reader carries out of this book that they didn’t have before they opened it?
I wanted The Wild Beneath to feel like an ocean world readers could sink into — a story where the magic feels so believable, it could belong to our own lives. At its core, this book also asks questions about who we really are and what we’re here for. I hope readers carry away the sense that they’re allowed to listen to themselves more deeply. That there are still hidden parts of ourselves we can reclaim. That transformation is possible. And that there is still mystery, reverence, and beauty available to us, even right here, right now.
Where can readers find you & purchase the book?
You can find me on Instagram at @doctorkellyanderson, and on my free Substack at wearethewild.substack.com.
The Wild Beneath will be available wherever books are sold, including independent bookstores, Indigo, Barnes & Noble, and online retailers. It’s published by HarperCollins Canada and Park Row, and releases on August 4, 2026.
