Writing at the Wellspring: Cover Reveal + Early Praise
Final cover design, official description, and advance endorsements
Dear Living Dark reader,
At long last, I can share the final cover design for Writing at the Wellspring. Preorders will open soon (I’ll send details later this month).
Many of you have watched this book take shape through essays here over the past three years. Now you can see what it has grown into.
Official Description
Here’s how I’ve officially described the book for its publication page:
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.
Advance Praise
“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
“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
“Writing at the Wellspring helps us see how our most basic assumptions about creativity are mistaken. . . . 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. It lovingly deconstructs what our culture believes—what you believe—about how writing happens.”
—Katrijn van Oudheusden, author of Seeing No Self: Essential Questions to Reveal Our Nondual Nature
“From my perspective, this work is part of the essential work, the necessary ‘remembering,’ the deep river of wisdom that is flowing from a true source, grounded traditions that have been repressed and derided. Just off to the side of our modern world’s preoccupied focus, there are wisdom traditions being kept alive all across the world, and now people are turning to them for guidance—or, like Matt, following and trusting a deep intuitive call for this time.”
—Carl Austin Hyatt, award-winning photographer
Early Reader Reactions
“I went through a challenging relationship with my writing, and your voice is helping me find my way out of that particular dark.” —M. Rickert, World Fantasy Award-winning author of Map of Dreams
“You’re writing some of the freshest stuff on spiritual creativity I’ve seen since Julia Cameron and Natalie Goldberg.” —R. J.
“Writing at the Wellspring does that really annoying thing that all good writing does, and that all writers want to do: It puts my most private, important, life-shaping and soul-shaping intuitions into words. It is a gift to anyone with a core creative longing” —Annalise Oatman, artist/psychotherapist
“Thank you for reconnecting me to a piece of myself that was buried just beneath the surface of the words I was writing. Engaging consciously with my daimon muse is the magic I needed.” —Kaleiheana Stormcrow, writer/dreamer
“I just want to say that what you’re doing feels revolutionary in this historical moment, getting us to focus on the voice within. It’s the only thing that can possibly save this species.” —Keiko Ohnuma, writer/journalist
“Invaluable and sometimes eerily serendipitous—the perfect book for this moment in my life.” —Christian Farrell, artist/educator
“Thank you for sharing your writing. It has been a tremendous help in shifting how I see creativity and ultimately life itself.” —Jonathan Blake, artist
“This is a league apart from other books on creativity, and I feel myself to be permanently spoiled for any other on the topic. I’ve spent more than a few years trying to life-hack and mindset-adjust my way through my recurring blocks and mulish resistance, constantly questioning whether I really wanted to be writing at all, fighting my inclination for periods of silence (and the guilt that was inevitable when I did go quiet). Wellspring has resolved all of that. I feel affirmed and validated, and ideas/theories that have only ever drifted in the periphery of my awareness are now fully tangible to me via your articulation of them. 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
Stay Updated
To stay updated, you can subscribe here at The Living Dark (or at my author blog at MattCardin.com).
Warm regards,
