Matt Cardin's Blog

Dear Living Dark reader,

Can you imagine the following appearing in The New York Times—or any other major mainstream publication—just a few years ago?

The Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, tasked with investigating U.A.P., has said it has no verifiable information to support reports of a government program to reverse-engineer extraterrestrial materials.

Or this:

In the film, Stratton says “I have seen with my own eyes nonhuman craft and nonhuman beings,” but declined to elaborate befo...

Dear Living Dark reader,

I have been reflecting on and mulling over the subject of artificial intelligence for quite some time now. Something I haven’t previously mentioned to you is that, adjacent to both this newsletter and my writing career, in my other guise as a college vice president and chief academic officer, I have somehow become the point person for all things AI at my institution. I’m the one leading the charge to figure out how we can and sh...

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 boo...

Dear Living Dark reader,

With Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein debuting on Netflix this week, I’ve been reflecting again on why Mary Shelley’s creation myth has haunted me for so many years, and why it occupies an important place in Writing at the Wellspring. Below are three pages from the book, including an excerpt titled “Frankenstein’s War...

Dear Living Dark reader,

Here’s a preliminary, provisional thesis that came to me this morning after I had sat quietly in something like meditation for half an hour and then started to read a couple of books (Peter Brown’s The Yoga of Radiant Presence and Joseph Jaworski’s Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership, for those who like to know such things):

Among the infinitude of potential configurations of the experiential field, not to mention the concomitant ...

Dear Living Dark reader,

Today I offer the following without commentary beyond this short note. You’re free to take it—or not—as you please. If I suggest that there’s something genuinely worth contemplating in the four quoted passages below, the last of which comes from my own Writing at the Wellspring (headed for publication on December 15, with preorders opening in about three weeks), you can take that ...

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.

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 silenc...

Writing at the Wellspring: Tapping the Source of Your Inner Genius is now fully typeset and laid out, and the proofs have been through a couple of rounds of corrections. Here’s a two-page spread from the introduction. It’s a section where I talk about why art matters in difficult times. Following your muse or daemon and engaging in creative pursuits can seem trivial in an age bristling with real-world crises. But I argue that this impression is mistaken, as ar...

Dear Living Dark reader,

In an age when a superficial surrealism pervades so many of the arts—movies, paintings, books, video games, digital art—courtesy of our collective pop cultural fascination with fantasy and the fantastic, it’s easy to forget or overlook that Surrealism, as a distinct and influential early-twentieth-century movement in art and literature, didn’t originally mean just a weird and warped style of writing or paintin...

Dear Living Dark reader,

I’m having an interesting time with my first-ever excursion into the territory of self-publishing with Writing at the Wellspring. From the start of my writing career around the turn of the millennium, my books have all been traditionally published, with the sole exception of A Course in Demonic Creativity, which I felt prodded by my daemon muse to release into the wild as a free PDF in 2011. It has remained available in ...