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 the official description from the back cover:

In Writing at the Wellspring, Matt Cardin draws on twenty-five years as a writer, teacher, and cartographer of the darkly numinous to reawaken the ancient idea of the muse, or daemon, as a hidden force shaping authentic expression and life purpose.

More than a manual of productivity, this book shows how writing can become a kind of 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.

Part memoir, part spiritual manifesto, and part guidebook for writers and creators, 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.

Advance Praise

“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

“I can’t think of any [other books] that link the creative act so uniquely or persuasively with spirituality—more specifically with the weird and uncanny as well as the life path of personal awakening. . . . Cardin powerfully calls on his own creative daemon to turn the adventure of life and writing into the brand-new adventure of living (and writing) into the dark.”

—Victoria Nelson, author of On Writer’s Block and The Secret Life of Puppets

“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

“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

“[Matt Cardin] understands that creativity and consciousness are inseparable, that our writing practice is also our spiritual practice. If you’re seeking permission to trust the dark unknown that guides your work, and your way of being in the world, this book offers profound companionship on that journey.”

— Amanda Saint, author, publisher, and founder of The Mindful Writer

“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,