The Hidden Force That Shapes Your Art

Announcing Writing at the Wellspring, a guide to creativity, the daemon muse, and awakening through your work

Dear friends,

After years of working at the intersection of creativity and the numinous, much of it shared here with you, I’m thrilled to announce that Writing at the Wellspring is ready to cross over into the world. Preorders for the Kindle edition are now available, with the book releasing December 15 in both print and electronic editions.

As I write these words, it’s the #1 selling new title in one of its Amazon categories. This feels both surreal and deeply affirming after the journey this book has taken.

Many of you witnessed this book taking shape here at The Living Dark. You helped brainstorm the title, responded to essays that became part of the book, and asked the questions that sharpened my thinking. This project emerged from the conversation between us, and I’ve tried to honor that in the book’s acknowledgments. In a real sense, you’re part of its DNA.

Here’s how I’m describing it to readers who don’t yet know this territory:

“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

If you’ve ever felt blocked, burned out, or adrift in your creative life, this book is an invitation to return to the 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 cartographer of the darkly numinous to explore the ancient idea of the muse, or daemon, 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.

Whether you work with words, paint, music, or any form of art, you’ll find help here to:

• Break through creative resistance and self-doubt

• Reconnect with sources of inspiration that have sustained artists for centuries

• Recognize creativity as a path of spiritual awakening

• See your art not only as output, but as a way of staying whole in a fractured 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, a book for those who long to unite their inner and outer lives in the fulfillment of their creative 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

If you’re ready to dive in, the Kindle edition is available for preorder now. The print edition follows on December 15.

For those who have walked this territory with me: thank you. For those just discovering it: welcome to the threshold.

Warm regards,