Writing from the Source: Talking to Joanna Penn About Creativity

My interview for The Creative Penn podcast on the muse and the creative unknown

Image by Sahil Singh from Pixabay

Dear Living Dark readers,

I was recently interviewed by Joanna Penn, the bestselling author and creative entrepreneur, for her podcast The Creative Penn. The episode dropped today under the title “Writing at the Wellspring: Tapping the Source of Your Inner Genius, with Matt Cardin.” You may recall that Jo kindly provided a blurb for my book, calling it “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.” It was a real pleasure to talk with her about the book’s themes. We talked about creativity as a collaboration with something deeper—and sometimes darker—than the conscious mind.

The only drag was some persistent noise on my end that you can hear during my portion of the conversation. I don’t know what caused it, but I hope the content of our interaction is interesting enough to make up for it.

Listen Here

You can also find the episode on the official site:

• The Creative Penn, episode 856 (with show notes and transcript)

About the Episode

Here’s the official description:

What if the source of your best writing isn't something you control — but something you learn to collaborate with? How can ancient ideas about the muse, the daimon, and creative genius transform the way you approach your work? And what might happen if you stopped fighting the silence and let it become your greatest creative ally? With Matt Cardin, author of Writing at the Wellspring.

What we talk about:

• How I balance a full-time academic career with my creative writing life

• The ancient idea of the genius, muse, and daimon

• Why creative silence (including writer’s block) may be a gift

• The stages of the creative process

• Living into the dark and embracing uncertainty

• How blogging and Substack can organically grow into books

From the Conversation

Here’s a short excerpt from the transcript (with Jo’s British spellings intact):

When you talk about the ancient Greek daimon, there was a whole well-developed tradition of that in ancient Greek philosophy and religion. A daimon was, in one famous sense, a spirit that you were born with, that the gods had given you. It was like your double, your higher self. It was the thing that represented your character, your interests, the blueprint and the outline that your life was supposed to follow.

[…]

For writers, my recommendation is to say, whether you believe it or not, whether you take it as a metaphor—which is fine—or whether you want to get somewhat mystical and delve into the idea that maybe there’s really a spirit or something, it doesn’t matter. Productively, with practical, measurable results, you can learn to relate to your creative impulse as if you are collaborating internally with someone else.

It’s the centre of why you’re interested in writing what you want to write, why you want to write the way you want to write, and even the types of things that unfold in the course of your career—both your creative career and the rest of your life, in the mould of the ancient daimon.

I have found that to be a vein of great power and meaning in my own life. I do it exactly the way I’m describing. I don’t actually believe it, but I don’t disbelieve it. I find that in experience, it really doesn’t matter. It works and it may as well be true.

If you’ve found my writings on creativity, spirituality, and cosmic dread here at The Living Dark—or in Writing at the Wellspring or A Course in Demonic Creativity—to resonate with your own creative and spiritual journey, you’ll likely find something here for you as well.

Warm regards,

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The inner work of the creative life:

READER REACTIONS:

• “It easily earns its place on my shelf of texts that have challenged and changed how I think about writing and the creative life.”

• “What I’m thoroughly enjoying is the way Matt Cardin weaves those deep, existential questions in and out of the practical, grounded realities of writing itself … This is a book that doesn’t just talk about creativity; it inhabits it.”

• “Matt has put into words things that have been alive in me for a long time, but which I have never articulated myself.”

• “There is potential here to change your life … Cardin’s writing stirred something dormant in me.”

• “This is definitely more than a self-help book on creativity. Matt Cardin’s range of scholarship, casual reading, philosophical spelunking and theological scholarship here forms into one single vision…If Colin Wilson and Krishnamurti and ST Joshi had written a tome on the essentials of creativity, it would be something like this.”

• “It was incredible finding an author able to describe how to unlock the skills I’ve been working on even further.”

• “This book is by far the best book I have read on creativity. I hope it will reach many people and help them freed from creative block, procrastination, paralyzing self-doubt, and perfectionism.”

• “This isn’t a how-to book about writing. It’s a book about why writing matters, and what it’s actually touching when it’s real.”

ADVANCE PRAISE:

“[An] intimate journey into the mystery of creativity and spirit… Cardin weaves practical methods, personal stories, literary references, and mystical insights into a lyrical meditation on what it means to create from the depths of the soul… both deeply personal and universally resonant.”
— BookLife review (Publishers Weekly)

“A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning.
— Joanna Penn, author of Writing the Shadow

“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 and The Secret Life of Puppets

“A meditation on the silence and darkness out of which all creative acts emerge....A guide for writers unlike any other.”
— J. F. Martel, author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice and co-host of Weird Studies

“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