Marisa McFadden · Easton, Pennsylvania
Writing, teaching, and the work
of paying close attention.
More than twenty-five years across newsrooms, university classrooms, and a practice and shop I built in downtown Easton. The rooms keep changing. The habit does not: listen closely, find what actually matters, and say it clearly enough that it lands.
The long way around.
It started in my living room with a handful of people and a feeling I could not quite explain yet, and it became Creative Spirit: a practice, a teaching space, a shop I am a little obsessed with, and a community in the heart of downtown Easton. Eight years in, I have worked with more than five hundred clients and built and led over two hundred workshops, courses, and gatherings.
Before that I was a newspaper reporter in Warren County, and then for thirteen years I taught writing, rhetoric, persuasion, and business communication at the university level. I founded the campus writing center at Centenary University and ran it, hired and trained the tutors, and wrote the training course before there was anyone to hand it to. I hold a master’s in English literature and a long habit of noticing how people say things.
What connects the parts is not the subject matter. It is the same practice underneath all of it: read the room, understand what a person actually needs, and give them language for something they may already feel but have not yet named. I learned that in a newsroom, refined it in a classroom, and use it every day now in a very different kind of room.
None of it looked like a plan while it was happening. A reporter learns to walk into a room she knows nothing about and leave with the true thing in it. A writing instructor learns that most people are not bad writers, they are just afraid, and that the fear tends to go quiet once someone reads them carefully. A shopkeeper learns that a room will do a great deal of the work for you if you build it right. I did not set out to collect those skills. I just kept needing the next one.
So this is the short version: twenty-five years of paying attention to how people say things, and of trying to hand them something better to say it with. Everything below is that in one form or another — the essays, the classrooms, the shop.
Five threads, one practice.
Five things that look unrelated on a résumé and are not unrelated at all. Each one is the same instinct pointed at a different room: work out what is actually going on, then build something that meets it.
Writing
Essays, op-eds, brand and persuasive copy, and long-form work. I started in a newsroom and never stopped writing for a living in one form or another.
Teaching
Thirteen years of composition, rhetoric, persuasion, and business communication at DeSales, Kaplan, and Centenary, in classrooms and fully online, plus every workshop since.
Practice
One-on-one sessions built on intuitive guidance and energy work, with long conversation at the center and the assumption that people already carry most of what they need.
Building
I made Creative Spirit from an empty storefront: the concept, the voice, the shop, the programming, the partnerships, and the operations that keep it running.
Facilitation
Workshops, multi-day retreats, women’s circles, concerts, comedy nights, and quiet gatherings. Two hundred of them, planned and run end to end.
Selected writing.
Two kinds of writing live here. The first is about place and civic life — the arguments I make in public about the town I live in and what it owes the people in it. The second is personal, and mostly concerns family, faith, memory, and the ordinary strangeness of being alive in Pennsylvania. Every piece opens in full, right on this page. Nothing is behind a link.
Essays on place and civic life
Essay · The Lehigh Valley · 2025
Eat, Drink, Be Quiet About Your Leanings
Third spaces are everywhere in Easton. Unless you lean right. On belonging, and what a place loses when only half the room feels welcome.
Read →Essay · Allentown · 2025
They Want to Show Up
91% of Americans report burnout. The people with the least time left over are often the ones who most want to be part of things. What do we do with that gap?
Read →Personal essays
Angels & Laundry
I drove an hour to a shrine in the middle of nowhere Pennsylvania, made a racket with my clogs, and waved at a stranger. Whether he was an angel or just an old man with nowhere better to be, I'm still not sure it matters.
Collect Calls and Spirit Guides
On my grandmother Angie, the town pool, and the particular way some people answer when you call.
Hail Mary
A road trip to Buffalo, five children, parking tickets in three states, and the patron saint of people who probably won't pay them.
Turning 42 and Thinking of TV. Huh.
On birthdays, nostalgia, and the deeply formative experience of watching 9 Broadcast Plaza on a sick day in the early 90s.
My Brother Pat
He was the kind of person rooms reorganized themselves around. On alcoholism, football stardom, and the missing puzzle piece.
Billie Jean
On the 3rd grade, a bad haircut, a dad in spandex, and the particular trauma that comes from being loved too loudly.
A business built as
a place to become.
Creative Spirit is not a side project. It is the clearest expression of how I work: intuitively, entrepreneurially, creatively, and in relationship with a real community.
I founded Creative Spirit as a holistic healing practice and grew it into something larger: a place for one-on-one support, meaningful learning, thoughtful goods, guest practitioners, workshops, and gatherings.
The business asks me to use every part of myself. I am the practitioner in the room, the writer behind the voice, the buyer shaping the shop, the teacher building the curriculum, the host setting the tone, and the entrepreneur making the entire ecosystem sustainable.
What connects it all is a belief that transformation needs both depth and welcome. People need places where they can be curious, feel held without being managed, and encounter ideas or practices that help them return to their own lives differently.
Eight years in, it is a working answer to a question I could not stop asking: what would it look like to build a place where people are met rather than managed? Some days that means a healing session. Some days it means restocking a shelf, writing an email that has to sound like an actual person, or moving chairs before a workshop. It is all the same job.
Visit Creative Spirit Easton →Holistic Sessions
Individual healing work centered on presence, energy, reflection, and the needs of the person in front of me.
Classes & Workshops
Learning experiences in meditation, healing, creativity, spiritual practice, and personal development.
Curated Shop
Books, gifts, tools, and meaningful objects chosen to support ritual, reflection, delight, and everyday wellbeing.
Community Space
A home for guest facilitators, private gatherings, conversation, collaboration, and the creative life of Easton.
The record.
Newsroom to classroom to writing center to shop, in reverse order, plus the two degrees that started it.
Founder and Owner
Creative Spirit, Easton PA
2018 — Present
Mindfulness Instructor, K–7
Shanthi Project, Lehigh Valley PA
2025 — 2026
Instructor of Rhetoric and Writing
DeSales · Kaplan · Centenary
2001 — 2016
Founder and Manager, Campus Writing Center
Centenary University
2003 — 2005
Staff Reporter
The Warren Reporter, Warren County NJ
1998 — 2002
Master of Arts, English Literature
Centenary University, Full Tuition Scholar
2005
Bachelor of Arts, English Literature, Concentration in Technical Writing
Centenary University
2001
Let’s make something
meaningful.
I’m open to thoughtful roles, collaborations, teaching, speaking, writing, wellness partnerships, and creative projects that make use of the whole person. If the work needs a strong voice, an entrepreneurial mind, a practiced facilitator, or someone who knows how to turn an idea into a place people want to enter, I’d love to hear about it.
The fastest way to reach me is email, and I answer it myself. If you would rather see the work first, every essay above opens in place, and Creative Spirit is in downtown Easton if you would sooner start by walking in.
