About Brenda Missen – Brenda Missen, Author

Brenda Missen is the author of the literary thriller Tell Anna She’s Safe and the memoir Tumblehome: One Woman’s Canoeing Adventures in the Divine Near Wilderness, as well as a memoir in the finishing stages, Blue Threads Loosened: The Untangling of a Sisters Story. Knowing she wanted to be a writer from age ten, Brenda went off to university to read novels for four years. She graduated from the University of Toronto with an Honours Bachelor of Arts degree and Specialist Certificate in English Language and Literature. She now had the background she wanted to pursue a literary career, but with graduation came a reality check: how to make a living? After a few years working as a typist (and then “word processor operator” in the early days of computers), she discovered the field of freelance editing.

Brenda had her own professional writing and editing business for nearly forty years. She got her start with Toronto publishers such as Doubleday Canada, Summerhill Press, and McClelland & Stewart. After moving to Chelsea, Quebec, her main clients became departments of the Canadian federal government. Since 1999, she has lived on the Madawaska River in the wilderness heart of eastern Ontario, where until 2025 she maintained her clients through e-mail and divided her time between her communications business and her own writing. Now she is unfettered from editing to pursue her own writing “full” time.

After years of trying to write short stories and discovering they are definitely not her forte, Brenda managed to get two published (see Uncollected Works). Much more within her comfort zone is the essay genre: she has contributed personal essays and profiles to the Canadian Wildlife Federation magazine Canadian Wildlife, the paddling magazine Canoeroots, the Canadian Recreational Canoeing Association magazine, Kanawa, and her local newspapers, Barry’s Bay This Week and The Valley Gazette.

Tell Anna She’s Safe (Inanna Publications and Education, 2011) is her first published novel. The novel is based on the true story of her friend and colleague Louise Ellis, who disappeared from her home in Ottawa in 1995.

Tumblehome: One Woman’s Canoeing Adventures in the Divine Near Wilderness (Inanna 2022) is her first work of narrative nonfiction. Part memoir, parttravel adventure, part spiritual autobiography and large part ode to the Earth, Tumblehome traces an emotional and spiritual journey within the framework of a series of solo canoe trips Brenda undertook in Ontario’s Algonquin Park over half a dozen summers. She is now putting the finishing touches on Blue Threads Loosened: The Untangling of a Sisters Story – a memoir that chronicles her fraught relationship with her sister, Kathryn, and the healing that took place between them after Kathryn’s sudden death in 2014.

A keen canoeist, hiker, swimmer, and cross-country skier, Brenda spends as much time as possible outdoors. For 16 wonderful years this was in the company of her beloved canine companions, Joy and Hershie (to be the subject of the next memoir, Joy and the Boy) and then Maddy. Since Maddy’s passing in 2021, Brenda has been happily taking care of other doggies in the neighbourhood, though few of them are as calm in the canoe as Joy and Maddy were.

Brenda can still be found writing the old fashioned way, with fountain pen and paper, on a dock or rocky shore, or even, when inspiration can’t wait for solid ground, in a canoe.