Sandra McCulloch

Storyteller of history, memory, and emotional resilience

Sandra McCulloch is a Vancouver Island–based writer and former journalist whose work explores memory, inheritance, and the quiet forces that shape family narratives. Her fiction is drawn to what is kept and what is erased—how truth lives not only in what is remembered, but in what is felt. She writes stories that uncover the emotional histories carried beneath the surface of ordinary lives.

Sandra often found herself drawn to funerals for the chance to meet people she wished she’d known while they were alive. That instinct — to listen, to imagine, to restore voices lost — naturally led her into historical fiction.

In her historic novel The McClary Code, Sandra explores the vow Andrew McClary, a soldier in the Revolutionary War, made to protect his nephew Michael, while communicating love through a code: flashes of undeniable, unearned love.

While Andrew dies in the Battle of Bunker Hill, Michael continues to fight in George Washington’s army, then returns home to honor his uncle’s vow by watching over Andrew’s youngest child, Nancy McClary. Michael lives with the burden that he was never “enough” to be a McClary, yet feels his uncle’s enduring love in whispers and “codes.”

Her next book is The McClary Legacy, the story of Andrew’s daughter, Nancy, as she navigates her role as an expressive woman in a time that did not honor such. Nancy has her father’s notebook at her side as she journals her thoughts, all the while feeling a protective spirit hovering near and brushes with love she cannot explain.

In her memoir, The Generational Hush, Sandra traces the arc from childhood silence through a life of witnessing, avoidance, and self-protection — to a reckoning with her past through writing. Along the way she explores stifled love and inherited patterns, the cost of staying small, and the moment when the quiet witness inside her finally said, “I feel safe.”

The Fir and the Forgotten Man is a work of historical fiction that follows David Douglas, the Scottish botanist behind the Douglas Fir, and his Scottish terrier, Billy.

By Judge Alone is a deeply human novel about trauma, resilience, and the slow, difficult work of choosing compassion over certainty.

Under the Veil is about Charley Wright, who returns home to care for her mother after a stroke. As dementia loosens Edna’s grip on the present, fragments of the past begin to surface—some familiar, others long buried. What first appears to be confusion takes on a pattern, drawing Charley into a quiet search for meaning. Charley must decide what to do with a truth her family has carried in silence.

Cold Milk is the working title of her current project — a thriller where a former reporter wonders if a man’s claim he’s targeted by police is yet another cry of persecution — or is it true?

Sandra will be attending Bouchercon 2026 in Calgary, Alberta.

Beyond fiction, Sandra has written a personal blog, emotionaldiabetes.ca, exploring resilience and chronic illness. Her journalism is widely archived, including at newspapers.com.

Sandra lives on Vancouver Island, Canada, where she continues to write, research family history, and pursue the stories she feels fortunate enough to uncover.