Hi, I’m McKella!

I write under the pen names M. N. Kinch and M. K. Sawyer.

You know how little kids say they want to be astronauts or ballerinas when they grow up? I always wanted to be an author. Ever since I could hold a pen, I’ve loved books and stories, and I wanted to spend my life creating them.

In elementary school, I passed most of my recesses walking around the playground and making up little tales in my head (I still love long walks to get the creative ideas flowing), writing stories, or helping the school librarian reshelve books. I was always writing something, mostly short little stories, which I would then illustrate and staple together into little paper books that I’d try to sell to people.

This made me quite a weird kid who absolutely devoured books, particularly fantasy, ghost stories, and anything about horses. (Yes, I was—and am—a horse girl.)

My favorites as a child were the Harry Potter series, Wait Till Helen Comes by Mary Downing Hahn, and anything by Betty Ren Wright. I progressed to Stephen King, Gregory Maguire, and other adult fantasy and horror as I got older.

I also loved lyrical contemporary novels such as White Oleander by Janet Fitch and anything from Barbara Kingsolver. This potent blend of fantasy, horror, and contemporary fiction shaped my writing style and compelled me to include all three in my stories. I love elements of the magical and fantastical mixed with the creepiness of my childhood ghost stories; delicious, hair-raising freak-out moments; and real-life themes of family, identity, mental illness, and humans’ relationship to nature.

I kept writing stories through my teens and was published in a few youth anthologies. In my junior year of high school, I even won a short story contest. The prize was $50, which was the first time I was ever paid for my writing.

I started some novels, but I mostly played around with shorter projects while I was figuring out how to get stories out of my head and onto a page.

Publishing History

Writing has always been a place for me to vent emotions, indulge my curiosity, and generally figure out life.

In college, I started writing The Goblin’s Daughter—a story of a young girl who comes to believe she’s a changeling—as a way to channel my feelings of otherness that I felt as a child (and often as an adult). I finished my first draft quickly and continued to refine and revise over the next 8 years until I finally published in 2018 under the name M. K. Sawyer.

Over the next 6 years and through many big life changes, I wrote my Keepers of Time trilogy, a paranormal fantasy featuring some of my favorite tropes and obsessions such as psychic abilities, reincarnation, time travel, cults, immortality, and love that spans centuries. I then published the first installment under the name M. N. Kinch in 2024.

Book by book, I’m working to build a community of readers who are into the same stuff I am, and who flock to books for the same reasons I write them: to live other lives, see through the eyes of different characters, and to sink deeper into this human experience.

Current Favorite Authors

Alix E. Harrow. She is writer goals. 

V. E. Schwab. Anything she touches is magic.

Barbara Kingsolver forever.

I read lots of fantasy, horror, sci-fi, and contemporary fiction, but also the occasional historical fiction (especially if it has to do with art), nonfiction, graphic novels, drama, and poetry. Authors should absolutely read their own genre, but I also believe that reading across genres creates rich soil in which to grow our stories. 

Thank you for coming along with me. Happy reading!