Preorders open for ‘Writing at the Wellspring’

  • Post category:Book News
  • Reading time:3 mins read

My next book, Writing at the Wellspring is now available for preorder. The book releases on December 15. Immediately after preorders opened, it became for several days the bestselling new title in one of its Amazon categories.

Cover of Writing at the Wellspring
Preorder on Amazon

Here’s a description:

“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 Shadow

Have you ever felt that your truest creative work comes from somewhere beyond your conscious control? That in your best moments, you’re not so much writing as being written through? The ancients had a name for this force: the muse or daemon, the hidden genius that shapes authentic art and calls us toward our deepest purpose.

If you’ve ever felt blocked, burned out, or adrift in your creative life, this book is an invitation to return to that source. In a world crowded with noise and distraction, creativity asks us to step back into silence.

Writing at the Wellspring is a guide to creativity at its deepest level. Matt Cardin, known for his writings on creativity, spirituality, and the supernatural, draws on twenty-five years as a writer, teacher, and explorer of the darkly numinous to examine the ancient idea of the daemon muse as a hidden force that shapes authentic expression and life purpose.

Part memoir, part spiritual manifesto, and part guidebook for writers and creators, the book traces the undercurrents of resistance, silence, and awakening that flow beneath genuine art. More than a productivity manual, it shows how writing can become a kind of monastic practice: a way of renewal, an act of attention that aligns with the ground of nonduality, and a return to presence that steadies us in a collapsing world.

At once personal and cultural in scope, 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. It’s a companion for creators in the spirit of Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones, and Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art. But where those books focus on overcoming resistance and building practice, Writing at the Wellspring reveals creativity as a contemplative path, a way of awakening that unites your inner and outer lives in the fulfillment of your deepest calling.

“I can’t think of any [other books] that link the creative act so uniquely or persuasively with spirituality.” —Victoria Nelson, author of On Writer’s Block

This project has been a long and layered journey, involving years of writing, revising, distilling, and deepening, and it’s meaningful to see it taking its first public step into the world. If the themes of creativity, silence, the daemon muse, spiritual awakening, and the deeper currents beneath writing and life resonate with you, please consider preordering a copy.

Preorder on Amazon

We live in a demon-haunted world

Asmodeus, from the 1863 edition of Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire infernal

It’s the day before Halloween as I type these words, and here’s a reading suggestion to celebrate or otherwise acknowledge, enjoy, or honor the special flavor, ambience, and purpose of the season if you’re so inclined: “Defining the Demonic” by Ed Simon, from The Public Domain Review, October 25, 2017.

The subhead explains:

Although Jacques Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire infernal, a monumental compendium of all things diabolical, was first published in 1818 to much success, it is the fabulously illustrated final edition of 1863 which secured the book as a landmark in the study and representation of demons. Ed Simon explores the work and how at its heart lies an unlikely but pertinent synthesis of the Enlightenment and the occult.

Actually, the essay is well worth reading any time of year if you’re someone who’s drawn to insightful renderings of the way esoteric matters from the past can deeply inform crucial aspects of the present, as in the following brilliant passages:

While it’s true that the grand experiment of the Enlightenment was supposedly to shine the light of rationality upon the shadows of superstition, the desire to assemble all possible information is one which the grimoire and the dictionary share. And this yearning towards completion and the all-encompassing is not just a superficial similarity, for in their obsessions with words and language, the grimoire and the dictionary share a common faith — that mere verbal pronouncements have the ability to rewrite reality itself….

[B]oth magic and reason have a motivating belief in the inherent explicability of reality: that there is a given order to the world and that human minds can comprehend and control this order. Whether that order is supernatural or natural is somewhat incidental; that there is structure to the system is what is important….

With their words listed like demons, their concern with proper order and grammar (lest our spells don’t work), dictionaries can be seen as modern, secular grimoires. The Dictionnaire infernal, far from being an archaic remnant, reminds us that sharp distinctions between antiquity and modernity ultimately mean little. Ours has always been, and always shall be, a demon-haunted world.

Weird horror, spiritual awakening, and your creative daemon

  • Post category:Creativity
  • Reading time:3 mins read

The very idea of the muse, daimon, or creative daemon is infused with mystery, and even with potential fear. The sense of relating to an other within oneself, of receiving inner communications from an outer source, is frankly uncanny. In fact, there are distinct parallels between the idea and experience of the daemon muse and the signature artistic-emotional effect of weird horror. Both dive into the murky unknown and evoke feelings you can’t quite describe.

The daemon is a mysterious presence playing hide-and-seek in the psyche, much like the elusive object of fascination and fear in a story by Lovecraft, Blackwood, or Ligotti. Your daemon muse haunts you with — and more, it haunts you as — an aspect of your very self. This is distinctly reminiscent of the numinous dread that pervades a weird horror story. To live in conscious communion with this presence, entity, force, or intelligence is to live in a darkly enchanted universe, one where the boundary between inner and outer is blurred, where the infusion of creative inspiration becomes entangled with vivid outward synchronicities that propel you through the gates of Chapel Perilous and into a fertile state of spiritual emergency.

And even more: This very fact — the fear of your inner genius — contains the seeds of its own solution. The experience of the daemon muse is essentially dissociative. It’s a phenomenon in which one part of the psyche, the ego, perceives another part as separate or different, as an autonomous presence or intelligence with which “I” interact. This means it can serve as the seed for nondual self-realization, an awakening to or remembrance of your real identity in and as the whole: not only the whole of the personal psyche, but the whole of the cosmos in which this self is embedded, and beyond that, the Absolute Subject in which both self and a world arise.

To say the whole thing differently: In the darkest depths of Chapel Perilous, where you encounter the sense of an invisible and inescapable presence that feels simultaneously helpful and haunting, immanent and transcendent, intimate and mysterious, the very flavor or texture of this destabilizing experience may serve as the catalyst for a shattering instant of self-remembrance. It may trigger a reawakening to your real identity beyond the both of you. After that — though, to be precise, there is no “after” in a zone without time — all bets are off.

Cover reveal: Writing at the Wellspring

  • Post category:Book News
  • Reading time:3 mins read

I’m excited to share the final cover design for my forthcoming book, Writing at the Wellspring, which will be released this November/December. The book has also been typeset and mostly proofed, and it’s now moving steadily toward publication. Here’s the official description:

Return to the source of your creativity.

In a world of noise and distraction, creativity calls us back to silence. Writing at the Wellspring: Tapping the Source of Your Inner Genius is a guide to creativity at its deepest level, where writing, spirituality, and awakening converge. Part memoir, part spiritual manifesto, and part guidebook for writers and creators, it explores the ancient idea of the muse, or daemon, as a hidden force shaping authentic expression and life purpose.

Drawing on twenty-five years of experience as a writer and teacher—and as a cartographer of the darkly numinous—Matt Cardin illuminates the undercurrents of resistance, silence, and awakening that flow beneath all creative work. More than a manual of productivity, the book shows how writing can become a 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.

Written for authors, artists, and seekers alike, Writing at the Wellspring combines practical reflection with personal narrative and cultural critique. It invites readers to reimagine their creative lives as a path of awakening, guided by the hidden currents of genius within.

You can subscribe to this blog for updates on progress, including a preorder link that I will be providing soon:

The cover layout is by D. Patrick Miller of Fearless Literary, who’s providing book design and publishing assistance. The well artwork is a multiply iterated AI image.

What people are saying:

  • “These days you could fill a library the size of a city block with nothing but creative writing handbooks, yet I can’t think of any 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—as Matt Cardin’s Writing at the Wellspring. Cardin powerfully calls on his own creative daemon to turn the adventure of life and writing into the brand-new adventure of living (and writing) into the dark.” —Victoria Nelson, author of On Writer’s Block and The Secret Life of Puppets
  • “I can’t imagine anyone reading this book being the same person at the end as they were at the beginning.” —Melanie Leavey, author/artist
  • “Invaluable and sometimes eerily serendipitous—the perfect book for this moment in my life.”
    —Christian Farrell, artist/educator
  • “It puts my most private, important, life-shaping and soul-shaping intuitions into words.”
    —Annalise Oatman, artist/psychotherapist
  • “A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning. Part craft, part devotion, Writing at the Wellspring is a call to surrender control, listen beneath the noise, and create from the place where awe and fear meet. If the page is a threshold, this book will show you how to cross.”
    — Joanna Penn, author of Writing the Shadow
  • “The most illuminating book on creativity I’ve read in a long time. I consider it the third essential tome in a ‘trilogy of creativity,’ made up of The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, and now Writing at the Wellspring by Matt Cardin.”
    —Clint Watson, founder of BoldBrush
  • “This book’s understanding of no-self makes it especially important to any writer ready to see through the self illusion and realize the freedom this brings to any creative work.”
    —Katrijn van Oudheusden, author of Seeing No Self

(You can read more early reactions here.)

How Ray Bradbury’s ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’ haunted my youth

Cover of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes – the edition I read at thirteen

Today at Facebook I came across a post that’s amazingly effective at conveying both the plot and the emotional impact of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, which came for me—as it has for so many people—at a crucially vulnerable and susceptible point in my life, when I was the same age as Will and Jim in the story (13 years old). The FB post is from an account that goes by the title “Classic Literature.” And though I suspect it may have been written or at least assisted by AI, I still find it distinctly effective at articulating the darkly autumnal appeal of a novel whose importance to me I’ve always felt I failed to communicate whenever I have tried to tell people about it.

Here’s the post:

I finished Something Wicked This Way Comes last week, and I swear it’s still following me around like a shadow. You know how some books just… stay with you? This one crawled right into that part of my childhood where I used to lie awake at night, convinced something was watching me from the hallway.

Bradbury tells this story about two thirteen-year-old boys, Will and Jim, living in this perfect small town when a carnival rolls in at three in the morning. But it’s not just any carnival—it’s this twisted, beautiful nightmare where the carousel spins backwards and makes you younger, or forwards and ages you to dust. The carnival master, Mr. Dark, literally wears people’s souls as tattoos on his skin. Can you imagine?

What got to me, though, wasn’t just the horror. It was how Bradbury captures that moment when you’re thirteen and desperate to grow up, but also terrified of losing what you are. I kept thinking about my own childhood, how I used to sneak out at night just to feel brave, and how the world seemed full of both magic and menace. The way he writes about Will’s father, this middle-aged librarian who feels like he’s missed his chance at heroism—God, that broke my heart. There’s this scene where he literally fights the carnival with laughter and love, and I found myself crying because it felt so true.

The book reminded me why October always feels haunted, why carnivals still make me a little nervous, and why growing up is both the most natural and the most terrifying thing we do.

You can read the original at Facebook.

The cover photo I have uploaded is from the exact edition I read as a young teen. I bought the book from one of those book order forms we regularly received in school. I still remember sitting in my junior high/middle school science classroom and reading through that form, and absorbing the description of Bradbury’s book, and feeling magnetically drawn to both the story and the cover. Together they generated a sense of dark magic that the book not only fulfilled but, astonishingly, exceeded when it finally arrived. I had already read some of Bradbury’s work by then, including stories in his classic collections The Illustrated Man and S Is for Space. And I had felt the force of the delicious spell that his stories cast. But Something Wicked elevated that effect to a whole new level, reaching right down into my soul.

Such experiences are few and far between in one’s life. They deserve to be savored. And I have indeed done that, with Bradbury serving as a significant influence on my life and thought.