✦ This is Wonderwell
Ah! I’m so glad you found your way to my wild little corner of the internet, where we are writing ourselves back to life. Something wise and painful brought you here — maybe a creative impasse you’ve been stuck at for years, maybe a writing project you can’t seem to finish, maybe just the nagging sense that your destined creative life is happening in a parallel timeline that you can’t quite seem to jump into. You’re in the right place.
I’m Maggie Langrick, book publisher turned Wayfinder coach, writer, sensitive oddball, and defender of creative liberation. Wonderwell is where I share things I’ve made for writers who want to write but aren’t writing, or who are writing but not the way they wish they could.
Everything I share here — from free resources to courses to community membership to live events — lives under the umbrella of what I call creative recovery. That’s recovery from creative paralysis, the chronic condition of knowing you have something to say and being unable, for maddening and mysterious reasons, to say it. I had a scorching case of it for decades, and it made me feel like a zombie who was sleepwalking through someone else’s life story.
If you’re stuck in that bad place too, you’ll know it was as hellish as it sounds. But I found my way out. And now I’m coming back for you.
✦ The Backstory
I founded Wonderwell Press in 2013 as a hybrid publishing company, built on the conviction that books have the power to help, heal, and inspire. That press still thrives, and I remain its Founding Publisher in an at-large role that is mostly hands-off but entirely heart-on. If you’re a nonfiction author looking for a home for your book, the Hybrid Publishing link above will take you there.
But Wonderwell — the parent brand that lives on this site — offers something different. Where Wonderwell Press is an award-winning, professional hybrid publishing program, this site is a place where we can drop our masks and meet as friends and fellow artists, walking each other home on this rocky writing path.
A few years back, menopause was throwing a housewrecker of a party in my body and brain, when breast cancer and entrepreneurial burnout decided to storm in, uninvited. Together, the three of them knocked me flat on my ass. So I fired myself from Wonderwell Press and handed it to the good people at Greenleaf Book Group who have the energy to run it properly.
I gave up my home in Los Angeles, sold most of what I owned, and spent two years as a nomad, housesitting and couch-surfing around Europe, Canada, and the United States to rebuild my frazzled nervous system and figure out what I actually wanted to live for.
The result was something I hadn’t dared hope for: I regained my lust for life, found my feet as a late-blooming writer, and wrote my first book, Writing From Your Essential Self — forthcoming from Shambhala Publications in June 2027.
“Freedom is your birthright. It’s closer to you than you think. And living and writing this way is not harder than the alternative. It is so much easier than staying stuck.”
— Maggie Langrick
What I discovered in this accidental, radical, deeply unlikely chapter is something I could not have understood from the inside of my old life, no matter how many self-help books I published, or how sincerely I tried: that freedom — in your creative expression, in your heart, in your body, in the design of your days — is not a reward you earn after you’ve done everything right.
Freedom is your birthright. It’s closer to you than you think. And living and writing this way is not harder than the alternative. It is so much easier than staying stuck.
I want this for you, too — not the housesitting necessarily, but the freedom and joy. A creative life that stops feeling like something you never get around to, and becomes the actual texture of your days.
This is what I learned by losing everything and discovering I didn’t miss most of it. I am still learning it, honestly — still marveling at how serendipitous and strange a life becomes when you stop performing it and start actually living it, stumbling from grace to grace.
And the only thing I care about (almost) as much as my own freedom is helping you find yours.
If you want to read my creative work or learn more about me, come find me at my personal site, maggielangrick.com. This space, wearewonderwell.com, is home to my paid offerings and free community. And I hope it will become a home for you, too.
— Maggie