On Writing, the Daemon, and the Creative Unknown
My conversation with Joanna Penn on The Creative Penn podcast
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 not as self-expression, but as collaboration with something deeper—and sometimes darker—than the conscious mind.
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):
I know you know that I have worked in horror literature, the literature of cosmic fear. In cosmic horror, as laid out by the likes of Lovecraft and others, the basic effect has been analysed as constituting a disturbance of the universe.
That’s the horror of cosmic horror—the world is transformed into this nightmarish thing in a cosmic horror story, where there’s a haunting, threatening presence that’s out of the ordinary and it’s somehow bound up with the narrator’s interior world.
Life reveals itself as supernaturally or ontologically something nightmarish—there are awful forces that are about to erupt all the time. And whether anybody’s into cosmic horror or not, I think it’s pretty accurate to say that we each constitute our own world, our own cosmos.
A lot of the noise that we make—the mental noise and the complications we introduce into our own lives—is, usually unconsciously, trying to stave off confrontation with the otherness that is outside the barrier of our personal sense of self.
The weird thing is that that otherness is actually in us, and in fact, we can approach it in the figure of the daemon or the daimon or the muse. So creativity is fraught.
[…]
A lot of people have trouble getting along with their own unconscious, which is another way to put it. There’s a horror, a fear, a dread effect that comes when we feel like we are out of control.
[…]
In the book, I deal with some of that, and I talk about it from a non-dual spiritual viewpoint, because ultimately for me, these creative questions have become inseparable from spiritual questions.
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