The Living Dark: My newsletter’s first birthday

Yesterday my newsletter for writers, The Living Dark, had its first birthday. In recent years the movie reel of my life has sped up to a dizzying rate of speed, so it seems inconceivable that we have really traveled a full orbit around the sun since I published the first TLD post. But it’s true. Surreal, but true.

Here’s a post to mark the occasion, reflecting on the project’s past year while looking ahead to the future and explaining some new features that are in the works:

One Year of The Living Dark

If you’re interested in uncovering your writer’s voice and vocation through articles and essays that flow out of my 25 years as a published writer and 15 years as college and high school writing instructor, this newsletter is for you

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My new podcast: The Living Dark

I have just published the first episode of a podcast to accompany my Substack newsletter, The Living Dark. I invite you to listen:

Episode 1: The Remarkable Story of God’s Autobiographer, Jerry L. Martin

In it, I explore the remarkable story of Jerry Martin and his book, God: An Autobiography, as Told to a Philosopher, through an in-depth interview with him. Jerry, a former skeptic and philosophy professor, shares his personal journey of experiencing an unexpected encounter with a voice claiming to be God. We delve into the problem of spiritual discernment, the role of faith, and the varied reactions from others when they learned of his experiences and conversations with God. We also examine the significance of the relational aspect of God, the importance of understanding different world religious traditions, and the potential implications of this new understanding of God for religion today. I invite you to join us as we explore the diverse spiritual journeys individuals may undertake as they connect with the divine in their own unique ways.

There’s also another item of note when it comes to my newsletter: The title “The Living Dark” is new. These seven months after launching the project, I have decided to act on a suspicion that has whispered itself in my psyche from the start: that the title “Living into the Dark,” which I gave it when I rolled it out last September, is not entirely effective. It has always felt a bit lumpy. It never rolled off the tongue as smoothly as I would have liked. By contrast, “The Living Dark” both encompasses the original title—which in my mind always carried the implicit connotation “living into the (living) dark”—and expresses a meaning that is simultaneously more expansive and more pointed. It’s an ideal moniker for a project whose guiding theme and short description, which I have also recently retooled, is “the numinous intersection of religion, horror, creativity, and the unknown.”

In addition to the title change, there will also be a shift in focus as the matter of deep creativity, of the relationship that we each have to our own demon muse, however conceived or experienced, becomes focal, though I will continue to write about many other things, too.

Bradbury’s book people, Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex, and piano music for Dracula

An update on recent activity at my newsletter that may be of interest to all my readers:

First, a few days ago I published a reflection on Eisenhower’s dire warning about the military-industrial complex and the way his words actually proved to be a prophecy about where America was headed. In this post, I suggest that in our present-day, real-world dystopian scenario, the “monastic option” that Morris Berman famously laid out in his book The Twilight of American Culture—that is, the choice to deliberately preserve and pass down to a future generation some form of knowledge or way of living that can serve as the seed of a future renaissance—seems a valid and even necessary life path to adopt. By way of illustrating the point, I refer in my post to one famous fictional example of this monastic option in action: the “book people” in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

Second, just today I published a recording of my own personal piano setting of the famous opening theme from director Paul Morrisey’s Blood for Dracula, sometimes known as Andy Warhol’s Dracula, along with the story of why I love this music and how I came to create a piano version of it nearly 30 years after I first started trying:

Click on either image above to open the corresponding post.

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