I recently joined Robert, host of the Leafbox podcast, for a wide-ranging conversation on writing, creativity, and spiritual purpose—topics we first explored in the online course that I taught last fall, based on my (currently unpublished) book Writing at the Wellspring.
For those who prefer reading to listening, I’ve created a refined transcript that goes beyond a literal transcription, much like The Power of Myth book differs from its TV counterpart. The revised version enhances clarity, corrects errors, and makes the conversation more engaging as a stand-alone text.
The discussion covers themes like the daemon muse, nonduality, meditation, creative quietude, and the intersection of religion and horror. You’ll find section headings and a deeper exploration in the full post.
Recently I finished teaching a five-module course for Weirdosphere, the online learning platform created by the founders and hosts of the Weird Studies podcast. The title was “Writing at the Wellspring,” which, not coincidentally, is also the title of my newly written and not-yet-published book on creativity and spiritual purpose in an age of upheaval. That book, plus my A Course in Demonic Creativity, served as the required texts.
More than 80 students signed up for five weeks of lectures, suggested reflections, writing exercises, and vigorous group discussions. It was a greatly fulfilling experience for me as the teacher, and reaction from the students was likewise intensely positive, with many of them telling me the readings, lectures, and interactions generated a transformative experience for them.
I may end up teaching the course again in the future. You can read a full description of it in my Living Dark newsletter. Here’s the heart of that description:
October 22 to December 1, 2024
MC101: WRITING AT THE WELLSPRING
A Course in Daemonic Creativity
with Dr. Matt Cardin—author, educator
Where does creativity come from? Why do ideas and inspiration feel as if they come from “outside,” from an external source that whispers directly into the mind? What if the key to unlocking both your creative potential and the purpose of your life lies in embracing the darkness of the unknown? What if the path to spiritual awakening is also the path to authentic self-expression as a writer?
Beginning October 22, Matt Cardin, a two-time guest on Weird Studies and one of the great contemporary exponents of weird fiction, is offering “Writing at the Wellspring,” an online course based on his books A Course in Demonic Creativity and the brand-new, unreleased work Writing at the Wellspring: Creativity, Life Purpose, Nonduality, and the Daemon Muse.
This course goes beyond the typical writing or creativity workshop.
Students will progress through a series of lectures, readings, and discussions to explore the concept and experience of creativity as an inner collaboration with a separate force or intelligence within the psyche—what we can call the unconscious mind, the silent partner, the secret self, or, most evocatively, the muse, the daimon, the daemon, and the genius. The course will delve into the core concept of “living and writing into the dark,” embracing uncertainty and trusting one’s intuition as a pathway to unlock creative destiny. Students will examine ways to understand and navigate the tension between the drive to create and the impulse toward total stillness and inactivity that can accompany spiritual insight. Matt will share nondual perspectives on effortless action or creative quietude as a way to align personal creativity with the creative current that animates the cosmos. Finally, the course will examine the possibility of using writing and other creative work as a “monastic option” that makes a monastery of one’s life and provides purpose and meaning in a time of apocalyptic cultural transformation.
Students will receive access to the full text of both of Matt’s books, plus the full text of his short ebook Transmitting Vision: Essays on the Writer’s Path (previously available only to subscribers to his blog/newsletter, The Living Dark), along with additional suggested readings, plus prompts and exercises for sparking the imagination and deepening our understanding of ourselves, our world, and how the reality that gives rise to both can tell us what we’re here to do.
The final collection of weird supernatural horror stories by the great Mark Samuels is now available from Chiroptera Press. I was honored to be asked by Mark to write the introduction to it. What I didn’t and couldn’t know when I accepted his invitation was that Charnel Glamour would end up being Mark’s last, and would be published posthumously, several months after his sudden and untimely death in December 2023.
With the blessing of both Chiroptera Press and Hippocampus Press (the latter of which will be publishing a paperback edition in 2025), I have shared the full text of my introduction at my Living Dark newsletter. It includes not just my introduction to Mark’s book but my reminiscence of our more than two decades of friendship, standing as my tribute to him:
When my instinctive move in reflecting on Mark’s new book is to think back to where his career began, and to remember our early acquaintance, and to consider how this informs my own reading of Charnel Glamour, maybe I’m just trying to explain to myself how twenty years can possibly have passed, and why the memory of Mark’s first book still resonates with me all these years later, and how it is that he writes weird supernatural horror stories that patch directly into my apprehension, amplified by the passage of time, of the strange fact that we live in a world of phantoms in which we ourselves, despite our presumed solidity, may be the very source of spectrality….
[T]he Samuelsian weird fictional cosmos…is a place where I can sense some of the most pointedly personal intimations of metaphysical fear from throughout my lifetime peering through the elements of the various narrative vehicles that Mark has constructed for conveying his vision. Readers of such stories—readers like you and me—find pleasure in this emotion of weird and numinous fear. At the same time, we also recognize that stories like this are about more than just delivering a few literary fictional pleasures. They carry the ring or scent of truth. They feel like revelations, like forbidden transmissions, like windows or doorways to something that is real, but that we are otherwise not allowed to acknowledge or talk about. In short, they feel a lot like the supernaturally potent books-as-carriers that show up in many of the stories themselves.
If you, like me, have felt the allure of endless productivity advice wear thin and grow cold over time, why not try something else? Why not experiment with anti-productivity? Here are two preliminary and interlinked suggestions, accompanied by a third item that expands on the accompanying outlook:
1. ON GOALS
Productivity says: “Always visualize your goals. Articulate them clearly. Start with the end in mind. Know where you’re headed.”
Anti-productivity says: “Embrace ignorance at the outset. Have no idea where the hell you’re headed. Let it reveal itself one step at a time. Welcome the darkness of unknowing.”
2. ON METHODS
Productivity says: “Have a clear, organized plan. Break your work down into manageable units. Arrange them in logical order. Proceed in sequence. Establish priorities. Use techniques to manage your energy (Pomodoro, time-blocking, whatever). Stick to a schedule.”
Anti-productivity says: “Abandon any pretense of a chosen plan. Dive in wherever the energy beckons you. Use any technique or no technique, whatever moves you. Let your schedule and sequence be to just show up and see what happens. Follow the Stephen King approach: Just flail away at the goddamn thing.”
3. ON ENDS AND MEANS
The most problematic thing about productivity is that it tends to become an end in its own right, and a suckingly hollow one at that. Its Apollonian allure strokes the ego by promising it the position of CEO in our creative projects. This leads us to exclude the possibility of transcendence in principle, to replace the holy fire of inspiration with an illusion of being in control and choosing our own meanings and destinations. There is nothing actually, intrinsically wrong with articulating goals, having a plan, or using time-and-energy-management techniques. Where these things go wrong is when they promise what they can’t deliver (meaningfulness, fire, inspiration) and substitute themselves as ends instead of means. One of the most direct ways to confront this is to dive deliberately into the sense of being at sea without a bearing, walking a lonely dark road at night with just a dim flashlight for illumination, following the road and the current wherever they take you, and using whatever techniques you have at your disposal simply to keep moving and avoid disaster.
I have sometimes called this anti-productivity approach “living into the dark.” It is, if you want to think of it this way, a strategy for meeting your muse and divining your daimon, for calling on invisible creative help by broadcasting the acknowledgment that the real ends and meanings you serve are beyond you—or at least beyond what you conventionally think of a “you.”
Yesterday an online acquaintance asked me if I had any advice about horror for someone who’s just getting started. “Do you have any hard-earned nuggets of wisdom that you wish you had known at the beginning of your career?”
I started typing, and here’s what came out:
Advice on horror depends on which angle you’re asking from. Writing craft? Approaches to publishing? Philosophical perspective? Or recommendations for reading, viewing, etc.? From the craft and philosophical perspectives, I’ll simply offer my own riff on what Thomas Ligotti told Jon Padgett as Jon was undergoing his personal authorial mentorship under Tom’s guidance:
Zero in deeply, deeply, on what really frightens and horrifies you. Become absolutely clear on that. Use any writing or other creative activities that you do in this field to help you accomplish that act of inner knowledge. Seek the supremely perfect articulation of your personal horror, the summit of your private, individualized Mount Doom, the apotheosis in language of whatever naturally offers itself to you—and only to you, in your for-all-time uniqueness—as the absolute nightmare. Explore and perfect ways to describe this nightmare to yourself.
If you approach the writing of horror in this way, as the most deeply personal discipline of self-interrogation and dark epiphany that you can achieve, what you write will automatically, and paradoxically, prove magnetic to other people.
Additionally, and speaking solely as myself on a spiritual or philosophical note: Always remember that your horror is only as real as you are. This is both the way in and the way out.
