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.)