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“A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning.... If the page is a threshold, this book will show you how to cross.”
— Joanna Penn, author of Writing the ShadowIn this book, Matt Cardin draws on twenty-five years as a writer, teacher, and cartographer of the darkly numinous to reawaken the ancient idea of the muse, or daemon, as a hidden force shaping authentic expression and life purpose.
More than a manual of productivity, this book shows how writing can become a kind of monastic practice: a path of meditation and renewal, a way of aligning with the ground of nonduality beneath experience, and a return to presence that steadies us in a collapsing world.
Part memoir, part spiritual manifesto, and part guidebook for writers and creators, Writing at the Wellspring invites authors, artists, and seekers to reimagine their creative lives as a path of awakening, guided by the hidden currents of genius within.
“I can’t think of any [other books] that link the creative act so uniquely or persuasively with spirituality — more specifically with the weird and uncanny as well as the life path of personal awakening.” — Victoria Nelson, author of On Writer’s Block
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Matt Cardin is the author of To Rouse Leviathan and What the Daemon Said, and the editor of Horror Literature through History. A former professor of English and religion, he writes about the intersections of religion, creativity, spirituality, and the supernatural.__________________________________________________
WRITING AT THE WELLSPRING
Tapping the Source of Your Inner Genius
by Matt CardinPublished by Deep Current Press in association with Fearless Literary
250 pages, trade paperback • $17.95 print, $9.95 digital • ISBN 979-8-9932097-0-8
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Preface
In one way or another, every book reflects its author’s personal experience. This is certainly true of all the books I have written, including not only my collections of stories and essays exploring the intersection of spirituality and religion with metaphysical and ontological horror, but also the three encyclopedias that I have edit ed and curated (on mummies, the paranormal, and the history of horror literature). Whether I’m writing fiction or nonfiction, and whether I’m working on my own writing or helping to birth a collective work through editorial shaping and visioning, it’s all connected to my core creative fascination. And I know the same is true of you and your writing.
For me, the deeply personal nature of all this is especially pronounced when I write about creativity itself, particularly in rela-tion to spiritual insight or awakening. This was the focus of my previous book on the subject, A Course in Demonic Creativity, and it is likewise the focus here. Writing at the Wellspring takes it in a fresh direction, not by choice, but because this is simply where my understanding and engagement with the topic have led. This is no different from what happens to all of us when we’re creating honestly, from the center of our authentic perception and motivation. But sometimes the quality of personalness is more explicitly visible on the surface of a given work. That’s definitely the case here.
And that’s why I think this book will speak most directly to readers who share not only my topical interests but a sympathetic sensibility. I have never been able to reduce my native fascinations to a single focus, and virtually the entire gamut of what moves me, not only now but over the decades, is reflected in one way or an other in the pages that follow. So, I thought I would take a moment in this preface to specify who the book is for, based on who I believe will feel most at home in it because they grok the same things that I do when considering the heady themes of inspiration, insight, and the writer’s path.
This book will most likely appeal to you if you find yourself reflected in any or all of the following:
• You feel that true creativity, more than just skill or self-expression, requires listening to something deeper.
• You long to create in a way that feels honest, awake, and aligned with your truest self.
• You struggle with resistance not just as a block to productivity, but as a spiritual and psychological threshold.
• You find yourself drawn to nonduality, inner stillness, or mystical insight, not as abstract philosophy but as vivid recognition.
• You’ve glimpsed the uncanny truth that inspiration may not be yours but something that comes through you.
• You resonate with the idea of the muse or daemon, an inner presence that guides, haunts, and transforms your work.
• You see the signs of cultural unraveling and feel called to respond not with more noise, but with depth.
• You sometimes feel becalmed, both creatively and existentially, and find this confusing or even distressing.
• You hunger for the kind of writing that fuses the spiritual and the strange, even verging into the shadow realm of the weird, the ominous, and the numinous.
• You enjoy exploring the inner lives of other writers and seekers, and learning how they have grappled with the creative mystery.
• You sense, perhaps dimly, that your creative path is inseparable from your path of awakening, and that both are leading you somewhere beyond yourself.
For further orientation and grounding, here’s a quick road map:
In this book’s Introduction, I explore the strange convergence of personal inspiration and collective cultural crisis, introducing the core concept of living into the dark and proposing that our cre ative blocks and breakthroughs are bound up with more profound questions of identity, meaning, and metaphysical truth.
Part One, The Call of the Daemon, explores the mysterious nature of inspiration and the deeper forces — psychological, spiritual, and perhaps transpersonal — that shape the creative act. It lays out a view of creativity as a collaboration with a semi-autonomous inner intelligence rather than a product of conscious effort, and it examines this muse or daemon as inner companion, creative double, and emissary of something beyond the ego. It also looks at how this figure was ejected from mainstream Western intellectual culture, with harrowing consequences that still shape us today.
Part Two, The Flashpoint of Silence, turns to the role of spiritual stillness in authentic creativity. It investigates how silence, surrender, and the collapse of self-as-doer are often preconditions for creative emergence. It also considers the uncomfortable tension that we can sometimes feel between our creative and spiritual motivations.
Part Three, The Axis of Creation, brings these threads together in an exploration of resistance, creative flow, and the act of writ ing as a spiritual path. It intensely interrogates and deconstructs the experience of creative block, and it considers how creative practice, when aligned with one’s deeper nature, can become not just a source of personal insight but a sustaining way of being in a time of cultural upheaval. The final chapter presents creativity as a way to preserve meaning and consciousness in a decaying culture by fulfilling one’s unique purpose. It reimagines creative-spiritual practice as a form of quiet devotion, a grounded, even monastic, orientation to life in a disoriented world.
Again, if any of this resonates or connects, this book is probably for you. We’re most likely kindred spirits, so maybe some of what I share here will resonate and help you along your creative path, until it becomes evident that there’s really no path at all, no journey or destination, but just a timeless presence, absolutely here and inescapably now, where creation is continuously unfolding in the very fact of your own being, which takes the appearance of a self and a world, and which sometimes takes the form of writing or creating other things within that dream. I’m glad we found each other in this world of shifting shadows.
