Learning to Play with Words Again

By Samantha Ladwig

There are some who claim writer’s block is a fiction. But a little over a year ago, whenever I sat down at my computer, that’s exactly what I was confronted with—and I knew why.

My time was limited during this maddening period, wrapped up in my then-job as a bookstore owner, and I had developed a bad habit of only writing on assignment. I needed an acceptance to justify shifting my attention from the shop to an essay. The problem with this approach was that my writing...