About The Living Dark

Testimonials

“So happy I found your newsletter. Your insights on the writing process resonated deeply with me.” — Jennifer Sablich

“I’m so glad I found you, just as I was about to totally give up. Thanks for sharing your experience and knowledge.” — V.

“Your writing has helped me tap into parts of myself I feel very strongly but often struggle to articulate, particularly my relationship to spirituality, creativity, and what it means (or doesn't mean) to be a person.” — Andrew Sanger

“I really resonate with what you’ve written about creativity and spirituality.” — K.

“Your work has very much connected with me, especially the elements covering existential dread, Ligotti (of course!), and how we writers/humans can curate our own ‘meaning’ without coming apart.” — William Grabowski

The Who, the What, and the Why

I’m Matt Cardin, and The Living Dark is my personal online journal and podcast at the intersection of nonduality and the daemon muse. A writer’s guide to the inner genius. A chronicle and guidebook for waking up at the confluence of creativity, writing, religion, horror, nonduality, apocalypse, consciousness, and culture.

My overarching purpose here is to help you tap into your deep creativity by sharing what I have learned in 25 years as a published writer and 15 years as an English teacher and professor. I also have a lifetime of experience as a classically trained pianist. Creative work, combined with education, has been at the center of my life’s journey.

I place a special emphasis on understanding and working with the creative impulse as if it’s a separate force in the psyche, an autonomous intelligence with which you collaborate: your inner genius, your silent partner, your muse or daimon.

When you learn to work with your unconscious mind like an inner partner, you align creativity with will and destiny—your whole life purpose.

This newsletter's macro-message is about following the creative daemon wherever it takes you by embracing the eternal unfolding edge of mystery. It’s about not plotting the novel of your life, but instead seeing it emerge spontaneously from the darkness of primal creativity in each moment.

This means the content here is varied, as it follows the energies and inspirations that move me.

For more on this theme, see these three posts, which launched the project in September 2022.

Who

I’m the author of six books and the editor of four more. I have a Ph.D. in leadership studies and an M.A. in religious studies. I spent 15 years teaching English composition and literature, first as a higher school teacher and then as a college professor. I also taught college courses in world religions. Presently I’m a college vice president. My books have been nominated for the World Fantasy Award, long-listed the Bram Stoker Award, and praised by Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and others.

You can read more about me at my author website. You can also connect with me on the platform now known as X (formerly Twitter) at @TheMattCardin, where I’m very active. My X presence is a direct complement to this publication.

What

The Living Dark tracks the same themes and interests that have animated my books.

This means it encompasses:

• creativity, writing, the demon muse, and the phenomenon of inspiration

• weird and supernatural horror (and fantasy and SF)

• apocalyptic and dystopian cultural trends

• nonduality, religion, and spirituality

• meditation and nonduality

• anything landing within the vaguely proximal zone of these intersecting topics

Why (to subscribe)

By subscribing, you’ll support the long-term advancement of this project, which includes both a podcast and a planned book on the writer’s daemon. The latter will be both a guide to working harmoniously with your own demon muse and a meditation on the influence of this creative force in history, literature, and culture, including its dual role in both fomenting our present collective sense of imminent apocalypse and helping us know how to navigate wisely through it. In other words, it will be a substantial expansion, reworking, and re-visioning of my popular A Course in Demonic Creativity.

I offer both free and paid subscriptions.

• As a free subscriber, you’ll get interesting things delivered right to your inbox, including my ongoing series of “Notes & Gleaning” post featuring links, reflections, and curated reading recommendations. You’ll all receive a free preview of my short ebook Transmitting Vision: Essays on the Writer’s Path.

• As a paid subscriber ($5 per month or $50 per year, or $100 as a founding member), you’ll help to increase my bandwidth for pursuing this project, and you’ll gain the following added benefits:

  • Never miss an entry. All will go directly to your inbox, both free and paid entries.

  • Gain access to essay posts that are exclusively available to paid subscribers.

  • Gain access to the entire content archive.

  • Gain access to audio versions of the essays. (This feature is presently in development.)

  • Gain access to transcripts of podcast episodes.

  • Receive a copy of my ebook Transmitting Vision: Essays on the Writer’s Path.