Master of Fine Arts in Writing and Consciousness educates through conversation lessons with you about writing, reading, English.

I recommend Marika as a potent teacher of writing, not only because her own writing is so good, but from seeing her work with others. This occurred in the context of an oppressive institution's demands that nurses write resumes with "exemplars" of their professional excellence. Unpretensious nurses, many of whose first language was not English, learned under her tutelage, to recognize their own merits and describe them effectively. In short, she taught not only effective writing, but the confidence to do so.

Marika has been writing for more than 40 years. She taught English to adult Taiwanese while living in Taiwan in the 1970s, wrote to assist research projects at Albany Medical School, published a poem in a national anthology. She represented women writers at the United Nations.

She wrote novels during the 1970s—1980s, but withdrew the one from publication a few years ago to revise it.

In the early 2000s, she wrote essays and detailed plans for mitigating disasters in getting her Master of Sciences/Health Sciences summa cum laude from Touro University International. Within a few years, she received the Masters of Fine Arts in Writing and Consciousness from the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), first in her class, based on writing poetry. While at CIIS, she was one of the editors of their award-winning annual journal, Mission at 10th.

All of the work for the Masters degrees was simultaneous with her working in Medical-Surgical step-down units and the Mental Health inpatient unit at Stanford Hospital, California. There she wrote detailed reports about patient care, published research articles on novel observations about patients; and, working her way to be recognized officially as an Expert Nurse, was very effective in teaching other nurses how to write clearly, concisely, and effectively to substantiate their position as competent and promotable nurses.

She continues to edit and to write both prose and poetry for publication.