Writer · Educator · Organizer
Marisa McFadden
Twenty-five years of writing across every format and every kind of audience. From Easton, Pennsylvania — on civic life, community, and what it actually takes to keep people connected to each other and to hope.
Essays on community,
engagement, and what matters.
Written for practitioners, organizers, and anyone trying to understand why people stop showing up — and what it takes to bring them back.
Letter · Civic Communications
A Letter to Murmuration
On an older mother navigating playground politics, exhausted disbelief versus apathy, and what it actually takes to keep people connected to the belief that things can change.
Read →Civic Essay · The Lehigh Valley
Eat, Drink, Be Quiet About Your Leanings
Third spaces are everywhere in Easton. Unless you lean right. On political exile, belonging, and what communities lose when only half the room feels welcome.
Read →Civic Essay · Allentown
They Want to Show Up
91% of Americans report burnout. The communities with the least bandwidth have the most desire to engage. What do we do with that gap?
Read →Advocacy · Patch.com, 2014
"Dig Deeper and Look Harder"
Testimony before the Easton Area School Board opposing budget cuts that would eliminate 36 teaching positions and dismantle programs the district had spent decades building.
Read at Patch.com →The longer work.
Pieces about memory, family, grief, joy, and the strange business of being alive in a body, in a community, in this particular century.
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.
Organizing, advocacy,
and community.
EASD Community Coalition
In 2014, faced with a school district budget crisis threatening 36 teacher layoffs and the elimination of a music program that had lifted generations of Easton children out of poverty, I founded the Easton Area School District Community Coalition.
I organized parents, teachers, and taxpayers who had never organized before. I wrote the press releases, appeared on regional television, published the op-eds, and stood before a school board and a community divided against itself to argue that the choices being made at the top were being paid for by everyone at the bottom. The coalition ran for two years. A charter school application that would have diverted public resources from all district children was denied twice, 7-2.
What that fight taught me: change happens when someone shouts that change is possible. The how matters less than the whether.
"We implore you that you dig deeper and look harder. These cuts must not happen."Marisa McFadden, Easton Area School Board testimony — Patch.com, January 2014
Mindfulness instructor, Shanthi Project — delivering evidence-based, trauma-informed mindfulness curriculum to K–7 students across the Lehigh Valley public school system.
Founder and practitioner, Creative Spirit Easton — a healing and community gathering space at 131 North 3rd Street, Easton, PA, operating intentionally as a politics-free third space since 2018.
Visit Creative Spirit Easton →The longer version.
I have been writing in one form or another for twenty-five years. Staff reporter. Columnist. Essayist. Professor. Op-ed writer. Community organizer. And for the last seven years, the sole communications director of a business I built from the ground up in a former factory city on the Delaware River.
What I have learned across all of those roles is that the hardest part of communication is almost never the writing. It is understanding what a specific person, in a specific moment, with a specific set of fears and loyalties and exhaustions, is actually able to hear. I learned this in newsrooms. I refined it in classrooms. I put it to work at school board meetings and community tables and one-on-one sessions with people navigating the hardest chapters of their lives.
I live in Easton, PA — a small city that contains multitudes: arts scene, food scene, immigration, poverty, revival, division, beauty. I built a gathering space here intentionally designed as a politics-free zone. One place in this city where people from every background can exist without performing their political identity. I understand what the research shows about third spaces and civic participation because I watch it play out every single week.
I have five children, a deep suspicion of easy answers, and a decades-long commitment to the idea that the right words, given to the right person at the right moment, can change what happens next.
Founder and Communications Director
Creative Spirit Easton, Easton PA
2018 — Present
Mindfulness Instructor, K–7
Shanthi Project, Lehigh Valley PA
2025 — Present
Instructor, Rhetoric and Writing
DeSales University · Centenary University · Kaplan University
2003 — 2016
Co-Founder, Campus Writing Center
Centenary University, Hackettstown NJ
2003 — 2005
Staff Reporter
The Warren Reporter, Warren County NJ
1998 — 2004
Master of Arts, English Literature
Centenary University — Full Tuition Scholar
2005
Get in touch.
For writing inquiries, speaking engagements, collaboration, or press. I respond to everything that deserves a response, which is most things.