In her final term at high-school Kathy Mac lived in a boarding house because her family had moved to the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan; upon graduating she joined them, for several months working as a teaching assistant in a school for expatriates’ children in Tarbella (about midway between Islamabad and Peshawar). This prepared her for a summer spent working at a day care in Whitehorse when she returned to Canada, though not for the subsequent winter employment in a down jacket factory back in Peterborough. The next year, 1982, she moved to Halifax where she studied drawing and textile arts at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University, during which she studied abroad for one term in southern Venezuela, and another in the mountains of Peru.
She worked for several years at the first desktop publishing company in Atlantic Canada as well as freelancing as a designer and editor. She then returned to academe, eventually pursuing a doctorate at Dalhousie.  After graduation, she taught part-time in the English departments at MSVU, Dalhousie, St. Mary’s and the Art History department of NSCADU, until 2001, when she received a nine-month appointment to the Department of English at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, where she is now Chair.