Maggie grew up in the Midwestern and Eastern US during the '60s and '70s, when advertising was fresh and new. She learned about the world of persuasion (design) from her late father, graphic designer and design educator Bill Kinser, and her mother, Charleen, who won three Cannes awards in the '50s for animation and in the mid-70s established the handmade toy company Charleen Kinser Designs.

Soon after graduating from St. John's College, where in her final year she was dating a caucasian Japanese national, Maggie set off for Japan. She spent the majority of her early adult years there, 6 in Tokyo and 9 in the countryside. Maggie wrote about whatever interested her, from the strange but profitable live beetle trade on Tokyo's streets to the gradual retreat the 20th Century seemed to make from her rural Japanese village as winter settled in every year.

Maggie has written articles in English for the Asian Wall Street Journal, Metropolis, and Graphis, among others. In Japanese, her work has been published in the Journal of Architecture and Building Science, Kodomo Pia and the progressive housing magazine Chil Chin Bito. Graphis magazine was a major client of Maggie's from the beginning, commissioning profiles of more than 25 superior designers in Japan, Korea, China and the U.S. Her latest book, 12 Japanese Masters (2002, Graphis Inc., New York), is the culmination of this period of work.

Among Maggie's other books are Japanese Working for A Better World (1991, Honnoki Inc., Tokyo), interviews with more than 60 individual activists trying to involve Japan in a sustainable future; Y.M.D.: Ancient Arts, Contemporary Designs (1992, Robundo Publishing, Tokyo), five essays on the marriage of traditional Japanese rural industrial traditions and the internationally viable product design of Mr. Takenobu Igarashi; and several books for Edizioni Press in New York, including Architecture and Society; John Ciardullo Associates and a trio of books on recent projects by the renowned Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa.

Maggie spent the last nine years of her life in Japan living in a 100 year-old thatched farmhouse, where she became intrigued, and ultimately frustrated, with the tenacity of tradition in the craft of thatching. In 1999 she instigated and hosted a two-month cross-cultural rethatching of the house, bringing together on the roof an eager young Japanese thatcher and a mature, efficiency-minded British one. An hour-long documentary about Maggie and the project aired twice on prime-time Japanese TV, attracting the interest of thatchers and thatched homeowners around the country. Maggie is now pursuing information and opinions on U.S. thatch projects and, as a metaphorical counterpart, on the McMansion boom that erupted in her absence from the United States.

Maggie has spoken to audiences of more than 200 in Japanese, and audiences of almost 150 in English.