Ross Pennie, MD

Educational and Professional Background:

  • Graduate of Lisgar Collegiate Institute, a public high school in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada: 1970
  • Graduate of Queen’s University Medical School, Kingston, Ontario, Canada: 1976
  • Physician-Surgeon, Catholic Mission Vunapope, Papua New Guinea: 1977-79
  • Residency in Pediatrics, Ottawa, Ontario: 1980-83
  • Fellowship in Infectious Diseases, University of Virginia, Charlottesville: 1983-85
  • Lecturer in Pediatrics, Hospital Infantil Albert Sabin, Fortaleza, Brazil: 1984-85
  • Fellowship in Pediatric Infectious Diseases, Vancouver, British Columbia: 1985-86
  • Full-time academic practice (Assistant Professor), University of Ottawa: 1986-91
  • Full-time academic practice (Full Professor), McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario: 1991-2003
  • Community Infectious Disease practice in Brantford, Ontario, with part-time McMaster affiliation since 2003

My personal writing journey:

My first journal dates to the four-day train trip I made solo at age ten across the Canadian Prairies and Rockies from my home near Medicine Hat, Alberta to Vancouver, B.C. Yes, I travelled alone and unsupervised. I now guard that diary in a special place, and smile when I read the innocently chronicled details of every meal I ate and every bear, elk, and mountain goat I spotted.

In 1977, at age twenty-five, having never set a toe inside a Catholic church, I set off for a two-year posting at a Catholic Mission on a remote island in the South Pacific. As a newly minted doctor, I craved adventure. I got it in spades in the juggle-clad islands of Papua New Guinea. I found myself in the hot seat in more ways than one, living smack in the middle of the Pacific’s Ring of Fire where volcanic eruptions were a weekly occurrence.

From the first desperate struggle to save a Papuan child who was brought to me dehydrated and pulseless, through countless cases of cerebral malaria, machete injuries, and tuberculosis, I knew I was living an experience like no other. On rare quiet evenings I consumed the memoirs of James Herriot, the country vet, and the lyrical prose of AJ Cronin, the Scottish doctor-writer who chronicled his colourful life and ultimately created television’s Dr. Finlay’s Casebook. As I’d done at age ten, I kept a meticulous diary. The telephone seldom worked, there was no photocopier, and email was a creature of the future, so I wrote scores of letters home on those blue, tissue-thin aerogrammes you rarely see nowadays. The mail was so slow that it took six weeks to get a reply from even the most conscientious of my correspondents.

During the next twenty years back in Canada, I daydreamed of penning my tales of the South Pacific, but life got in the way. Finally, when I was desperate for a pursuit that would lift me out of the medical milieu a few hours each week, I signed up for a creative writing course at my university. It was called Freeing Your Voice. It unleashed mine and I never looked back. I attended further writing courses and workshops, scrutinized writers’ memoirs (Stephen King’s was the best), and read all manner of books on writers’ craft (Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird was the best). I joined a group of amateur writers who met weekly. They spurred me to keep writing way into the night, no matter how pressing the demands of home and hospital. After two-and-a- half years, I completed a manuscript suitable for submission to a publisher. Eighteen months later, my book, The Unforgiving Tides, smiled at me from the new-releases shelf at not only our local bookstore, but online and at every branch of a major chain across our northern land.

Among the most unexpected aspects of my journey have been the queues of smiling faces eager for my signature and a personal note inside their copies of The Unforgiving Tides. And now it’s all happening again with TAINTED, my medical mystery novel published in spring 2009 by the talented people at ECW Press in Toronto.

Where do I find the time to turn out novels and still work full time at the hospital as an infectious-diseases specialist? I carve the hours out of the early morning, from seven to nine-thirty. I’ve never been a morning person, but I manage to drag myself out of bed about six, rejuvenate the grey cells with a shower, then hunch over my laptop, swaddled in the peace of my study. That degree of commitment means that something has to give, but I don’t skimp on time with my wife and our two grown children now away at university. It’s television I’ve cut out of my life. That, and academic papers – I figure I’ve written enough of them over the years, and others can carry that torch perfectly well.

Two crucial words come to mind when describing my writer’s journey: encouragement (that comes from family, friends, colleagues, and readers) and persistence (that comes from within, via the inspiration of successful writers I’ve met along the way, such as Anthony Bidulka, Tess Gerritsen, PD James, and Robert J Sawyer).

Medicine remains my calling, but creative writing is my passion.

One final note: I love to hear from readers – if you’ve read my books, please send me an email, or put pen to paper if you prefer.