Wendy McLeod MacKnight

Background

Wendy was born in Fredericton, but grew up in St. Stephen, which she still considers home. She wrote her first novel at age nine, Pam’s Summer, about a girl who lived above a laundromat in New York City. She’d never been to New York City or stepped inside a laundromat. Still, she continued to write all through her teens, mostly bad poetry about boys who broke her heart, and wrote the first draft of It’s a Mystery, Pig Face! – titled the much more forgettable Me, The Gang, and the Man in the Dark Suit – in the time period between her Bachelor’s and Master’s degree. She was living out West and homesick and decided to write a story about her childhood neighbourhood. After getting a lovely rejection letter, she put it away and decided that perhaps a writing career wasn’t for her.

For the next twenty-five years, she worked for the Government of New Brunswick, first as a policy analyst, then as Director of Early Childhood Services, Director of Long Term Care Services, Assistant Deputy Minister at Social Development and finally as Deputy Minister of Education and Early Childhood Development. She also taught Sociology at the University of New Brunswick, made a bunch of wonderful friends, and raised a couple of spectacular children.
But the dream of writing never died and Wendy left government at age fifty to give it a go. After a complete reworking, and rejection by many literary agents, Wendy was signed by the LKG Agency in New York City, who sold It’s a Mystery, Pig Face! To New York City Publisher Sky Pony Press in the summer of 2015. Her second book, a fantasy set at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, was sold at auction to Harper Collins’ Greenwillow Books in the summer of 2016 in a two-book deal and will be published in the spring of 2018.

Publications

It’s a Mystery, Pig Face! Sky Pony Press 2017
ISBN-13: 978-1-5107-2280-4

Upcoming: Fantasy Novel titled The Frame-up set in the Beaverbrook Art Gallery
set to be published by Harper Collins’ Greenwillow Books in spring 2018

What I Offer

What I Offer:
– Presentations on writing and revising
– Presentations on finding your voice
– Presentation on the journey of an idea to a book
– Presentation on It’s a Pig Face!