Along with forty-nine other high school students, as the author recounts of their student, Meghan is part of an elective two-week academic writing workshop. Each day begins with a freewrite exercise like this one, designed to help students develop what the workshop directors call "fluency." Like Meghan, many students write prolifically in other composing environments, but their enthusiasm for writing often disappears in schools. The focus of this article, is to help students capitalize on what cited author Jenny Rice calls "para-expertise," or knowledge gained through lived experience that students carry in their bodies without necessarily being able to articulate. The goal of a para-expertise perspective is not to reject traditional forms of expertise but to draw on students' full range of competencies. Because para-expertise is often tacit, teachers face the challenge of recognizing, validating, and nurturing the experiential and embodied knowledge(s) that students possess alongside the more easily discernible categories of expertise our rubrics measure. This article explores the concept of para-expertise in the writing classroom using Meghan's freewrite journal as a limited case study. Situating Meghan's text in a discussion of para-expertise and reading it through that lens, the author suggests how a writing teacher might respond to Meghan's writing and student's self-diagnosed writing "blocks." The author also considers practices that can help students productively use their para-expertise in academic writing.