Born in Montreal but raised in Clearland from the age of 10, the Park View Education Centre graduate left the area in her late teens bound for Ontario where she earned a liberal arts degree in philosophy and linguistics at the University of Toronto.
"I was 18 and didn't know what I wanted to do with my life," she laughs.
After graduation, Ms Hickey found work as an administrative assistant at a government office, a position which eventually morphed into the field of graphic design.
While that career lasted about a dozen years, it failed to scratch a musical itch which had been with her since her childhood.
"I came from a family of music lovers but not a lot of people in the family can perform music. There were no Sunday night kitchen parties or people playing fiddles," she explains. "I guess the legacy of my family is the storytellers."
Ms Hickey's mother is noted poet, author and retired educator Jan Barkhouse, while her grandmother, Joyce Barkhouse, is a member of the Order of Nova Scotia best known for her hugely popular novel "Pit Pony."
That pedigree rubbed off when Ms Hickey, who played clarinet in her high school band, later began seriously considering pursuit of a career as a singer-songwriter.
"I got a guitar on my 18th birthday from my stepdad and just sort of went from there," she recalls. "I was in a couple of bands when I was in my early 20s. I started performing solo in my mid-20s when the last of the three bands I was in broke up, but I just wasn't ready for it personally. I didn't enjoy it so I stopped performing for about eight years and just kept writing and getting myself together enough that I could do the other components of it like getting up on stage. All those nerve-racking things."
In the mid-2000s, she finally began performing again in public and released her first album, "Love Bites," in 2008 which was followed two years later by her second effort, "The Day the Money Run Out."
For the past several years the idea of returning home to Nova Scotia was playing on Ms Hickey's mind and finally, last December, that dream came true.
"It's partly because I love it here, partly because my grandmother is 98 now and I wanted to be able to spend some more time with her while I still had that opportunity," she explains. "And I was getting hugely sick of Toronto."
One day she jokingly posted a message on her Facebook site expressing her dissatisfaction with living in Canada's largest city and wondering if anyone back home had a room that she could rent.
"And one of my friends wrote back and said you can rent the top of my house," she laughs. "I wrote back and said are you serious because I was only half kidding."
The friend's offer was indeed serious and by year's end Ms Hickey found herself back on the South Shore, living in the picturesque community of West Dublin "and loving it."
Since that time she has been performing regularly at a variety of venues in the local area, and in October will embark on a tour of the Maritimes and Ontario.
Her next big gig in the local area is set for August 5 when she will take to the stage at the Lunenburg Folk Harbour Festival.
"And I have four more CDs already written but I just don't have the wherewithal to produce them yet," she laughs.