Mary Ann MacDonald was born in Woodstock, New Brunswick in 1954 to John Donald MacDonald and Freda Margaret “Maggie” MacDonald (nee Christie). Her childhood took her to several parts of Canada, including Westville, Nova Scotia and Kincardine, Goderich and Windsor, Ontario. She earned her undergraduate and Masters degrees in Social Work from the University of Windsor and went on to complete a PhD in Psychology at the University of British Columbia.
Mary was a highly intelligent and thoughtful person, with a spirit rooted in kindness and generosity. She lived a life marked by curiosity, intelligence, humour, adventure, and an abiding fascination with the world around her. She had an unusual ability to look closely at something, be it a bird, a plant, a landscape, or a person, and see something that others might miss. And, she had a remarkable gift for turning what she observed into stories, poems, and reflections about what it means to be human.
Mary was a prolific poet and an insightful writer of prose. However, writing was not merely an occupation or an accomplishment for Mary, it was a process that helped her to comprehend the world around her. She wrote poetry for ballet and public art, with her work appearing in Room Magazine and Pique NewsMagazine. Her chapbook, Going In Now, was published in 2014, while her collection of short stories, The Crooked Thing, was published in 2020. She also wrote the libretto for the opera, Siddhartha, that was composed by her brother, Peter.
She was a member of the Vicious Circle Writers Group, a community of writers and friends that became an important part of her creative life. She was also a member of the board for the Whistler Writers Festival, as well as serving as the curator and moderator of its poetry division. She wrote extensively for Whistler’s Pique, often on subjects such as bird watching and gardening that challenged her to expand her knowledge and understanding. However, her articles were never simply about birds or gardens; Mary used the natural world as a gateway into larger questions about learning, change, resilience, and human nature.
Mary leaves behind writing that will continue to speak for her. The Vicious Circle Writers Group has committed to facilitating posthumous publication of her novel Where Is Palopo, inspired by the challenging lives of her husband’s (Ray Muller) grandparents. Her collection of 44 poems, How To Be a Bird, is also slated for posthumous publication. These works will allow her voice, imagination, and distinctive way of seeing the world to continue beyond her lifetime.
Mary’s final article, slated for publication in Pique, may have been the most revealing of all. Remarkably, Mary was still working on it the day before she passed. Even as her life was drawing to its close, she was engaged in the work that had occupied and nourished her for so many years: observing, thinking, making connections, and finding the words to express what she saw. In that article, Mary wrote about the seasons of a garden and saw them as a reflection of the stages of her own life and her journey with cancer. Spring, summer, autumn, and winter became more than seasons. They became a way of thinking about growth, wholeness, change, decline, and, ultimately, letting go.
One of the songs she loved most was Bruce Cockburn’s All the Diamonds in the World, whose imagery of wind, sunlight, and the sea seems particularly appropriate for someone who found so much meaning in the natural world.
For her family, Mary Ann will be remembered for much more than her degrees, books, and literary accomplishments. She will be remembered in photographs from hikes (which usually included one or more of her Westies), in conversations that wandered into unexpected territory, in laughter, in travel stories, in gardens, and in the changing seasons. She will be remembered as a sister who could challenge you, amuse you, frustrate you, and surprise you. Bruce Cockburn’s The Whole Night Sky encapsulates how we feel about our loss: “See my tears, they fill the whole night sky... the whole night sky.”
Mary’s life was complicated, creative, funny, searching, and full of words. And, it was unmistakably her own.
Mary passed peacefully on August 29, 2026, at St. John’s Hospice in Vancouver, surrounded by some of her closest friends. Mary is survived by her kind and caring husband, Dr. Ray Muller; by her mother Maggie; by her siblings David, Robert “J.R.”, Margaret “Maggy,” Don, and Angus; and, by her nieces Heather, Madelline, Gabrielle, and Simona and nephews Charlie, Geordie, and John. She was predeceased by her brother Peter Macdonald.
