Marijke McCandless Award-Winning Author, Presence Coach & Playfulness Instigator
Photo Credit: Chad Thompson, Monkey C Media
Marijke McCandless is an award-winning author, mindfulness coach, and playfulness instigator who helps others shed their inhibitions and skinny dip in the present moment.
Her latest book, Naked in the Now: Juicy Practices for Getting Present (Collective Ink, 2024), has earned wide acclaim, including the Grand Prize at the CIBA Mind & Spirit Awards, a Gold Medal at Readers’ Favorite, and honors from the Wishing Shelf and NIEA Awards. It was named a 2026 Mindful Upgrade by New York Lifestyle Magazine and featured in Spirituality & Health’s “Books We Love.” Kirkus Reviews gave it a “Get It” verdict, calling it “refreshingly uncomplicated ways to improve relationships with a partner or with oneself,” while Publishers Weekly’s BookLife Prize described it as “inviting, simple, and motivating… comprehensible and easy to navigate.”
She is also the author of More: Journey to Mystical Union Through the Sacred and the Profane, an award-winning memoir with a devoted readership.
Marijke is the creator of the Naked Writing method — rooted in the contemplative writing tradition and her decades of awareness practice — shared through Write Now Mind, a global writing and awareness community she founded during COVID. The practice was featured by Arianna Huffington on Thrive Global as an example of a life-changing habit.
Her essays and articles have appeared in Spirituality & Health, Thrive Global, Woman’s Day, Best Self, More to Life Magazine, and The Seattle Times, among others, and she was profiled in RJ Magazine (Las Vegas Review-Journal).
A Summa Cum Laude graduate of UCLA, Marijke has founded and led businesses in both the legal and telecommunications industries. Known for her playful spirit, tenacious heart, and adventurous soul, she has been married to her beloved since 1984. Together they raised two daughters and now spend their days exploring desert trails, gathering stories, and seeking out rock-climbing crags across the American West — continually returning to the simple, radical practice of being here now.
Photo Credit: Martina Zandonella
When did you discover your passion for writing?
I always wanted to be a writer — and by 1995, I had begun to freelance successfully as a travel and essay writer, mentored by Seattle Times travel writer Jim Molnar. But that year, a personal and marital crisis became the catalyst that changed the course of my life. I stepped away from writing for others and turned inward. During those years, I never stopped writing entirely — I wrote only in my journals, following the thread of my own interior life.
That 17-year hiatus turned out to be essential. When I emerged, I had written my memoir — drawing heavily from those raw journal passages — and I understood something I couldn’t have learned any other way: that we have to live our material before we can write about it for others. But living it isn’t enough. We have to be willing to face the most difficult corner of a life honestly — within ourselves and on the page — and allow those words to flow.
That understanding is now the heart of everything I teach as a writer and Presence coach. Writing fulfills a curious dual need: the inward pull of soul-searching and the outward hunger to share. Writing and awareness practice go hand-in-hand. Awareness practice teaches me to notice the details. Writing asks me to capture those details. I pay attention to write better, and I write to remember to pay attention better. The intention, either way, is to experience a moment fully and capture its details before they slip away. I write not only to create something new but to transform and heal. For me, writing isn’t separate from being fully alive. It taps directly into my vitality center.
Tell us about your workshops and retreats.
In the last five years, teaching has become a devotion. I work at the intersection of awareness practice and writing, rooted in my belief that when we allow words to flow without interference, our natural voice gets heard — and the themes that want to be expressed through us begin to surface.
I’ve worked with writers across the full spectrum — complete beginners to highly skilled practitioners — in settings ranging from intimate workshops of a few writers to retreats with nearly a hundred participants, such as Outwild™. I teach monthly in-person workshops in Las Vegas through Write by Red Rock, and I lead Write by the Sea — a weekly writing practice I originated in Loreto, Baja California. During COVID, I founded Write Now Mind, a virtual writing and awareness community that continues to draw participants worldwide, generating a profound sense of connection among strangers who have never met or even seen each other. Arianna Huffington featured the practice on Thrive Global as an example of a life-changing habit.
I’ve also guest taught at the University of San Diego Extension, San Diego Writers Ink, and with the International Memoir Writers Association, and have led retreats on my own and in collaboration with others — including Marni Freedman, co-founder of the San Diego Writers Festival and the International Memoir Writers Association. I’ll be moderating a panel at the San Diego Writers Festival this year and teaching multiple workshops at the Las Vegas Writers Conference this spring.
Photo Credit: Martina Zandonella
Share your signature Naked Writing method.
At a writing workshop I led for Outwild™ beside the South Fork of the American River — with nearly a hundred hikers, climbers, and adventurers, most of whom didn’t consider themselves writers — a man responded to a simple open-ended, two-word prompt and found himself writing about his mother’s deathbed. Gratitude tangled with regret. Love that was imperfect yet full. His voice trembled. Almost everybody wept. He had entered the session guarded and left open — and in five raw minutes, so had the rest of us. What draws people in is never polished perfection — it’s authenticity.
That is the power of Naked Writing. The practice speaks to something I believe is true for all of us: that we have a curious dual need — for inward soul-searching and outward expression.
People often ask, “Isn’t this just journaling?” Not exactly. Journaling tends to look backward — recording a day, reflecting on feelings, making sense of an experience. Naked Writing is presence-based. Raw expression without agenda or polish. Journaling records. Naked Writing reveals. For many of us, perfectionism and self-censorship are constant hurdles — Naked Writing bypasses both. That raw material often contains the unexpected gold that later shapes our most powerful work.
We start by following four simple rules — borrowed from writing practice pioneer Natalie Goldberg: keep your hand moving, be specific, lose control, and don’t think. The prompts are deliberately brief, often just two or three words — the grease that gets the writer moving. What matters is not staying on topic but following what surfaces.
What makes it especially powerful is the second layer: the sharing. Writers read aloud without apology, and the group listens with deep, supportive attention — not critique. I liken it to belaying a climber: our job is to keep the writer safe enough to dare. But the magic works in both directions. When we witness someone else sharing their uncurated thoughts — raw, unpolished, unperformed — something in us relaxes. We see what becomes possible when the guard comes down. And that makes us braver, too.
What will people notice when working with you?
I bring an unusual combination to my teaching: a background in awareness practice and an entrepreneurial spirit that helped me found several businesses, taking me from top executive corporate boardrooms to mountain faces to silent retreats in the Sierra Nevadas to writing retreats on the Sea of Cortez. But what shapes my teaching most deeply is something harder to put on a resume.
I’ve learned that we have to be willing to face the most difficult corners of a life honestly — within ourselves and on the page — and find the words anyway. The most important thing I can offer is not technique but a safe enough container for truth to surface.
They’ll also notice the playfulness. I call myself a playfulness instigator for a reason. To me, play means being lighthearted as often as possible — participating naturally, without agenda, remembering to accept everything as it comes. Life is bound to have “hard” times—people get sick, people die, pandemics come along—but when I approach these with a light-hearted attitude of openness and willingness, I am much better prepared to respond than when I waste energy resisting and arguing with what is. I think people will see that for me frivolity and unstructured time are as important as discipline, because it’s play that keeps the creative, wild, messy spirit alive. Disciplined play and serious craft are not opposites — they need each other.
I model what I teach. I rock climb, travel, work hard, seek out beauty, and love listening to strangers. Writers who are awake to their own lives write better — and I try to live that way. At my workshops, people often arrive guarded and leave open and surprised by what they wrote. That transformation is what I love most.
Photo Credit: Martina Zandonella
Tell us about a few success stories.
One story I love to share: a woman who had spent her career as a house cleaner walked into one of my Naked Writing classes in her mid-sixties, having never written before. She began by writing a small, loving paragraph about her sewing room — the colors of fabric, the hum of her machine, the quiet joy of creating. She stuck with my writing practice group and, less than two years later, wrote her first five-page essay, drawing on that initial description, which revealed itself as the metaphor that would structure her entire essay — drawing on difficult childhood memories, ripping out seams, backstitching a life, mending what had been torn. That essay went on to win first place for creative nonfiction at the 2026 international writers’ conference and literary festival.
Another participant had been writing quietly in Write Now Mind for several years before she felt ready to go further. Last year, she also expanded her work into a full essay, which was chosen as a finalist and included in a published anthology of winners.
These are not isolated moments. I have scores of testimonials from people who came to a single workshop expecting to try something new and left surprised by what surfaced. Many write to tell me that the practice changed not only their relationship to writing but something larger — the way they move through their lives. That is the part that never gets old.
Your book Naked in the Now has earned wide acclaim. What are the takeaways?
Naked in the Now grew from something I kept noticing: that presence needn’t be a serious discipline or a distant achievement — it’s a playground. Most people put mindfulness in the “should do” bucket — worthy but demanding. This book pulls it out of that bucket entirely. What if getting present felt less like work and more like being seduced by life? It’s about arousing curiosity, shifting mindset, experiencing the power of vulnerability and authenticity, and discovering moments of delight that are available right now, in this ordinary moment.
The book offers thirty-four short, embodied practices, most under ten minutes. Through them, we learn how to relax, befriend our own thinking mind, stretch our limits, and restore and rejuvenate our relationship with ourselves and others. And the commitment is doable — just minutes a day. All it requires is a little curiosity and a dose of willingness.
Naked in the Now caught the attention of prestigious and beloved contests. It won the 2024 Chanticleer Grand Prize for Mind and Spirit, a Readers’ Favorite Gold Medal, earned a Kirkus “Get it!” verdict, and a powerfully positive review from Publisher’s Weekly BookLife Prize — and was selected for Spirituality & Health‘s “Books We Love” list.
I think it’s resonating because people are exhausted by abstraction. They don’t want to be told to be present — they want to feel what that means in their body. Melanie Carden of New York Lifestyles Magazine called it “an easy on-ramp to the balance most of us crave” — and suggested readers skip the morning doomscroll and reach for it instead. That made me smile.
What I hear most is that the book doesn’t feel like work. The practices are short — bite-sized, as one reader put it — making it easy to pick up and put down, to return to again and again. Martina wrote that it “breaks the myth that mindfulness has to be serious.” Charissa called it “the most beautiful, poetic, playful, and rebellious book I’ve ever read on mindfulness,” which is about the best thing anyone has ever said to me. And Jessica wrote that the phrase “Naked in the Now” has become something she repeats to herself daily — that it gives her “strength, courage, compassion, and the ability to be vulnerable.” That is exactly what I hoped for.
You’ll be moderating at the San Diego Writers Festival and the Las Vegas Writers Conference. What do you enjoy most about each?
What I love about the San Diego Writers Festival is the community — I’m deeply rooted there. I was a founding member of what is now the International Memoir Writers Association, guest-taught at USD Extension, and am friends with countless writers there. San Diego lit events feel like homecoming.
Las Vegas is a different story — and I mean that in the best possible way. This will be my first year teaching at the Las Vegas Writers Conference, and I am wildly excited. I met the founder at another Las Vegas writing event a year or so ago and taught a workshop for her writing group, so there is already a connection. Although I live here now, Las Vegas still feels fresh and fun — I’m getting to know my new writing community and looking forward to creating new lasting friendships and connections. It’s bound to feel kinetic, entrepreneurial, and full of writers at every stage who are genuinely hungry to grow. Teaching multiple workshops there this spring means I get to meet writers where they are and watch something shift in real time.
Both events remind me why the literary community matters so much — it’s where writers stop feeling alone with their pages.
What is your advice to new authors? How important is community and festivals?
Start writing before you feel ready. Just like I coach in my Naked Writing workshops: let the words flow. Don’t worry about punctuation, grammar, or whether you sound eloquent. Just start writing.
And don’t wait to connect with other writers. Join a writing practice group, a read and critique group, take a class, go to events, and talk to authors. The community is part of the process, not the reward at the end. Festivals like the San Diego Writers Festival and the Las Vegas Writers Conference are invaluable not just for craft instruction but for the profound experience of being in a room full of people who love writing, or are intrigued by it, or want to practice it.
The networking matters, too — agents, editors, fellow writers, potential collaborators. But more than anything, festivals allow new authors to call themselves writers. That shift in identity is often what makes everything else possible.
What is next?
I am developing an online course drawing on the teachings in Naked in the Now—bringing the practices to people who can’t attend a retreat in person. I also hope to release an audio version of the book this year. And I am beginning to speak more publicly about the power of vulnerability — especially through Naked Writing — about what happens when we drop our masks, get present, and allow ourselves to be truly seen. That conversation feels urgent right now, and I want to be part of it.
I continue to grow all three of my writing and awareness practice programs — Write Now Mind, Write by Red Rock, and Write by the Sea — and have more retreats and events in the works, with the hope of teaching at the San Miguel Writers’ Conference & Literary Festival.
As for writing, there are always more books whispering. A book on Naked Writing has been calling for attention for some time, and I have another idea quietly taking shape: Naked Along the Way, about the transformative value of silent retreats. In the meantime, I will keep writing, teaching, and following the words wherever they lead. There’s always more to say.
