Writing at the Wellspring: Tapping the Source of Your Inner Genius - Softcover

Cardin, Matt

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798993209708

Publisher: Deep Current Press, 2025

Synopsis

“[An] intimate journey into the mystery of creativity and spirit.” — BookLife review (Publishers Weekly)

What if understanding your creative life means reconsidering who you are, and where creativity comes from?

Have you ever felt that your truest creative work comes from somewhere beyond your conscious control? That in your best moments, you’re not so much writing as being written through? And what happens when that sense of inspiration disappears, leaving a long silence where the words used to be?

Writing at the Wellspring explores the relationship between creativity, identity, and spiritual awakening. Drawing on twenty-five years as a writer, teacher, and explorer of the darkly numinous, Matt Cardin examines the ancient idea of the daemon muse, the mysterious inner source of inspiration that can feel at once deeply our own and intrinsically beyond our ability to command.

Blending memoir, philosophical inquiry, and contemplative reflection, this book offers a profound way of understanding the writing life by delving into the underlying experience and meaning of creativity.

At its heart is a possibility that is simultaneously unsettling and liberating: The source of your creative work may be inseparable from the deeper reality of who you are. From this perspective, inspiration, resistance, ambition, and even creative silence take on new meanings. The urge to make art becomes an invitation to investigate your relationship with life itself.

For writers, artists, and spiritually curious readers, the book explores:

• The muse or daemon as a way of understanding your distinctive creative nature

• Resistance and self-doubt, and what they may reveal about your inner life

• Silence, withdrawal, and the tension between the drive to create and the pull toward stillness

• Nonduality—the understanding that self and world are not ultimately separate—and its implications for creativity

• Creative practice as a form of attention, self-discovery, and spiritual inquiry

Throughout, Cardin considers what it means to cooperate with the movements of creative life, including those that unsettle our ambitions or ask us to pause. What might become possible when we loosen our grip on productivity as the measure of our worth?

Writing at the Wellspring is a companion for anyone drawn to explore the mystery of making art, and also the mystery of being the person through whom it comes.

“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

“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

Edition details

• Publisher: Deep Current Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 13: 9798993209708
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 250