Matt Cardin's Blog, page 3

Weird Fiction and the Secret Landscape of the Soul

Dear Living Dark reader,

Today’s post is a very slight revision of one that I published under a similar title two years ago. Given the direction this newsletter has moved since then, along with other things like the writing course that I’m currently teaching online to seventy-plus students, it seems like a good time to revisit this piece and its focal topic.

That topic is the distinction between surface story and understory in works of fiction, and the way stories of the weird and supernatural—whi...

To Thine Own Muse Be True

Dear Living Dark reader,

“Your muse, daimon, genius possesses its own will and its own ways, and it visits and energizes you as and when it desires. Inspiration comes and goes. Your task is not to generate inspiration, and certainly not to control it, but to channel it, and to do so by whatever means necessary, so that when it shows up, you are there to listen, receive, and bring into being what it is intent on giving the world through you.”

Those words are from the fifth chapter of Writing at the...

The Deeper Magic of Reality

Dear Living Dark reader,

Some time ago, I was reading an absorbing interview with Alan Lightman, the theoretical physicist and author, about his 2023 book The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science, when I came across this fascinating passage, where Lightman explains the concept of “emergent phenomena” and why the reductionist approach of physics and chemistry doesn’t work when such phenomena are in play:

This brings up the concept of “emergent phenomena.” In your recent PBS docume...

A Dialogue on Divining Your Daemon

Dear Living Dark reader,

Here is a truth that I wish I had learned earlier in life: My life is not my own. My goals are not my own. My destiny is not my own. Whenever I have thought and acted as if I’m in complete control, meaning has vanished and things have gone awry. My one ultimately valid choice is to give up total control, to use what little control I do have to consciously accept that I was born with an inbuilt character and calling, and to work toward aligning with that instead of acting ...

Why Ray Bradbury Still Haunts Me

Publicity photo of Ray Bradbury from the television program Alfred Hitchcock Presents, 1959. CBS Television, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Dear Living Dark reader,

Each year when autumn arrives, I’m drawn by a kind of delicate inner gravity to revisit the works of Ray Bradbury, and to recharge his fictional, philosophical, and spiritual vision within me. I suppose that’s because this season with its heightened emotional tone of a bittersweet, energetic delight, mingled with gloom and melan...

The Daemon in Exile: A Cultural History

Dear Living Dark reader,

“What is the ultimate and final benefit of embracing your genius, meeting your muse, aligning with your daemon? It is simply that you heal this epic rift by owning up to what is really true of your personal experience, what is really true in a deeply human sense. You account for a missing part of yourself that, if you are at all a typical member of the culture in which and to which I am speaking, you have not been given an adequate set of concepts and attitudes for recogn...

The Haunting Presence of an Infinite Self

Dear Living Dark reader,

“For a certain kind of writer—the writer subject to a vastly polar creative cycle of speaking and silence, with very long bouts of the latter—the dread of committing oneself is at least equal to the desire to be published or heard. I speak from experience.”

Those words are by me, from something I posted on social media a couple of years ago. Sometime in 2022, I realized that for several months I had been using Twitter in the same way that I have traditionally used my priva...

The Daemon of Pen and Page

Dear Living Dark reader,

“What are you reaching for and aiming at in your reading and writing? What are you aching to find, understand, achieve, accomplish, or realize? How are they both, in the end—your daimon of the pen and daimon of the page—one and the same?”

That’s a snippet from Chapter Two of Writing at the Wellspring. I have previously shared the book’s introduction, conclusion, and first chapter. Today we continue with the second chapter.

In connection with this serialization of the book o...

Online Course: Writing at the Wellspring

Dear Living Dark reader,

This post is to announce a course that I’ll be teaching this fall. It starts next month at Weirdosphere, the learning platform established by author/filmmaker J. F. Martel and professor/musicologist Phil Ford in association with their popular Weird Studies podcast.

Paid subscribers here at The Living Dark will receive a 10% discount. The link is at the bottom of this post. Bear that in mind as you’re reading the section on cost in the course description below.

I hope you’ll...

The Book I Would Like to Be Buried With

Dear Living Dark reader,

Some years ago—fourteen, to be exact—I was one of several horror writers who were invited to contribute a post to the blog Horror Reanimated for a series titled “The Book I Would Like to Be Buried With.” The theme was clear: What book do you love so much, what book feels like such an inseparable part of you, that when your time eventually comes, you’d like to take it with you to the grave?1

This decade and a half later, when I reread what I wrote for that series, I realize...