Marisa McFadden · Writer · Founder · Practitioner
Words, healing, and the work of building community.
I’m an entrepreneur, writer, educator, and holistic wellness practitioner whose work has always centered on transformation. I teach, tell stories, build businesses, create experiences, and hold space for people to hear themselves more clearly. Creative Spirit is where those threads became one living practice.
Many disciplines.
One way of seeing.
The work changes form, but the purpose stays consistent: listen closely, make meaning, create an opening, and help people move toward a more connected life.
Entrepreneurship
Building a Business With a Point of View
I built Creative Spirit from an empty storefront into a multidimensional Easton business — shaping its concept, voice, services, shop, programming, partnerships, and day-to-day experience.
Wellness
Holistic Healing & Intuitive Practice
One-on-one work grounded in energy healing, meditation, reflection, and deep listening — creating room for clarity, emotional movement, and personal transformation.
Writing
Stories, Essays & Strategic Communication
Personal essays, journalism, public advocacy, brand storytelling, and persuasive writing shaped by a lifelong study of voice, audience, language, and what makes people care.
Teaching
Learning That Changes the Room
More than two decades of teaching rhetoric, writing, creativity, meditation, and mindfulness across universities, schools, workshops, and intimate community settings.
Curation
Objects, Experiences & Atmosphere
Curating meaningful goods, practitioners, workshops, and details that turn a physical space into an invitation to slow down, discover, and connect.
Community
Gathering People Around Meaning
Classes, conversations, events, collaborations, and civic work designed to help people feel less alone and more able to participate in the life around them.
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.
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.
Writing that argues
and persuades.
Longer-form pieces where the work is to notice what matters, understand an audience, build a case, and give people language for something they may already feel but have not yet named.
Essay · The Lehigh Valley
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
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 →Reporting · Patch.com, 2014
"Dig Deeper and Look Harder"
Testimony before the Easton Area School Board opposing budget cuts that would have cut 36 teaching positions and dismantled programs the district spent decades building.
Read at Patch.com →
The experience
behind the voice.
Review the full professional record and the cover letter prepared for Serenity Mountain. Each document opens as a downloadable PDF.
Résumé
Professional experience across communications, education, journalism, entrepreneurship, brand strategy, and community leadership.
Cover Letter
A focused introduction connecting Marisa’s background in persuasive writing, audience strategy, and brand-building to Serenity Mountain.
Words that moved
an audience to act.
Two things a marketing team wants to see: that I can build a brand from nothing, and that my writing changes what people do. Here’s the evidence.
A campaign that changed the outcome
In 2014, an Easton school district budget crisis threatened 36 teacher layoffs and a music program that had lifted generations of children out of poverty. I founded and ran the community coalition that fought back — and I did the writing that carried it.
The press releases, the op-eds, the public testimony: I wrote the messaging that turned parents, teachers, and taxpayers who had never organized before into an audience that showed up and spoke up. The coalition ran two years, earned steady regional press, and a charter application that would have drained public resources was denied twice, 7–2.
It’s the same discipline behind communication that matters: know exactly who you’re talking to, give them the right words at the right moment, and pay attention to whether anything changed.
"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
As founder of Creative Spirit Easton, I created more than a brand. I built the services, learning experiences, retail environment, partnerships, communications, and sense of welcome that allow the business to function as a living community space.
As a mindfulness instructor with the Shanthi Project, I bring the same grounded presence into Lehigh Valley schools, translating reflective practices for young students and the realities of a classroom.
Visit Creative Spirit Easton →Writing that holds
a reader.
These essays hold the family stories, contradictions, humor, grief, faith, and ordinary moments that shaped me. They are not separate from the professional work; they are where the human voice underneath all of it becomes visible.
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 whole life
inside the work.
I have spent my life working at the point where language, learning, healing, and community meet. I began in journalism, moved into university classrooms as an instructor of rhetoric and writing, became a public advocate, and eventually built a business that asked me to integrate every part of that experience.
At Creative Spirit, I am an entrepreneur and operator, but I am also a holistic practitioner, teacher, curator, writer, host, and creative director. I work one-on-one with people, design classes and gatherings, select objects for the shop, collaborate with other practitioners, tell the story of the business, and tend the atmosphere people feel when they walk through the door.
My professional writing and strategic work grow from that larger practice. I understand audience because I have taught, served, listened to, organized, and built relationships with real people for decades. I understand voice because I have had to make the same values coherent across essays, classrooms, campaigns, healing sessions, storefronts, and public life.
I am interested in work and collaborations that value the complete picture: intellectual rigor and intuition, business discipline and imagination, clear communication and genuine care.
Founder & Holistic Wellness Practitioner
Creative Spirit, Easton PA
2018 — Present
Instructor of Rhetoric & Writing
DeSales University · Centenary University · Kaplan University
2003 — 2016
Mindfulness Instructor, K–7
Shanthi Project, Lehigh Valley PA
2025 — Present
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
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.