Born on her grandparents' Cookstown, ON farm in 1933 and raised as a minister's daughter, Margaret Elise Kell graduated in English Language and Literature from the University of Toronto in 1955, married her Varsity heartthrob Thomas Alexander Robert Virany and headed for motherhood and a career in journalism.
Early employment was at the Toronto Telegram (receptionist) and Maclean-Hunter Publishing Company (steno), as well as freelanced stories for The Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, the Montreal Star and the Montreal Gazette. She was the first woman to serve as a professional secretary (public relations) at the Montreal Young Men's Christian Association, then the Toronto YMCA and the National Council of YMCA's. After giving birth to a son in 1961, she was program organizer for CBC-TV's first live nationally televised conference The Real World of Woman. She freelanced for consumer magazines, trade publications, the federal government (editing) and the Ottawa Citizen following the arrival of two daughters, and moves to Ottawa, ON (1966) and then its suburb, Aylmer (now Gatineau) QC in 1974.
When the community's historic English language weekly newspaper went bankrupt in 1981, she and Thomas co-founded and co-owned the Aylmer Bulletin along with Arthur and Kitty Mantell until Margaret, the editor, retired to write, edit and set up Virany and Virany Desktop Publishers to release local history books.
To date her Amazon and BookSurge catalogs include her family memoir A Book of Kells: Growing Up in an Ego Void,2002; Eating at Church, a collection of traditional recipes,2008; and her mother's adventuresome WWI war bride story Kathleen's Cariole Ride, 2011.
Margaret was introduced at the Centennial Conference honoring literary critic Northrop Frye at Victoria College, U of T in 2012. Eight sets of her class notes of his lectures, exceptionally complete because she used some Pittman shorthand learned on her first steno job, were chosen to appear online in the Denham library section of the fryeblog, available for public download.
