The Final Farewell

Well, here it is. The last post I will ever publish at The Teeming Brain. As previously announced, after 16 years I’m closing the doors to make way for a new project, which launched today.

But before we leave, a trip down teeming memory lane:

I started The Teeming Brain in June 2006. One month later, after a few preliminary posts, I published my interview with Thomas Ligotti. It became my first widely read post.

Three months after that, I published the first installment in my “autumn longing” series of reflections on the experience of sehnsucht, including my own deep acquaintance with it. As I was reminded just this week by a couple of reader messages, those entries spoke deeply to many people.

Beginning in 2007 I spent two or three years as a self-appointed prophet of blogified doom, publishing, for instance, a year-long weekly post series titled “Headlines from the Meltdown” in which I, with no real qualifications to understand economic and political realities, tried to take stock and make sense of the various apocalyptic-seeming trends and events that were then spilling out all over America and the world. I’m proud to say that I got this impulse out of my system long before the advent of our present era of the Crazy Cousin Doomer Demon Social Media Rant.

In the years after publishing my Ligotti interview, I published many additional interviews here. Today when I consider the full list of them — Thomas Ligotti, Kim Paffenroth, Mark Samuels, Stephen Jones, Nick Mamatas, Quentin S. Crisp, John Langan, T. M. Wright, Don Webb (interviewed for TTB by Richard Gavin), J. F. Martel, James Fadiman, and Gary Lachman — it’s an accomplishment that continues to please me.

In the summer of 2012, after running this whole thing as a solo act for six years, and having begun to feel a certain moribund sense of it, I invited several additional writers and relaunched TTB in a new format as a team-written affair, with me serving for the next two to three years as both an ongoing writer and the founding and managing editor. The “teem” of fellow thinkers and writers who joined me — Jason V. Brock, Richard Gavin, T. E. Grau, Ryan Hurd, Dominik Irtenkauf, David Metcalfe, Mark Samuels, Barry Taff, and Stuart Young — produced a wonderful set of columns and posts that dramatically elevated the blog’s quality and interest level.

In November of that year, riding the same wave of motivation, I produced a single Teeming Brain podcast. The title was “Sacred Horror vs. Cosmic Terror.” The guests/interviewees were Peter Bebergal, Nicole Cushing, Richard Gavin, Ted Grau, John Morehead, W. Scott Poole, and Jonathan Ryan. The whole thing was a blast from start to finish. It also took an absolutely ridiculous amount of my time, much of it stolen from my day job, which explains why there was no second installment.

It was after about 2015, when I was again the sole writer, that my posting/publishing activity began to grow thoroughly intermittent. I had taken breaks before, but now the pace of my posts slowed to something less than snail’s crawl. The blog was always there in the back of my head, but its energy only rose on rare occasions, leading me to post two or six or ten items within the span of a couple of weeks or a month, after which both it and I would lapse into blogly silence again. I learned not to fight this, as it was just an epicycle of a large cycle of speech and silence, activity and stillness, that infuses and characterizes my whole life.

The Teeming Brain started when I was living in Southwest Missouri and teaching high school English. It then followed me to Texas for a dozen years. It accompanied me as I became a college writing instructor, worked at two different higher ed institutions, was promoted to administration, lived in three different Texas towns, and then returned northward to my home territory of the Ozarks. It has accompanied me through the publication of my second, third, and fourth, and fifth books (Dark Awakenings, A Course in Demonic Creativity, To Rouse Leviathan, and What the Daemon Said), and the creation/editing of three academic encyclopedias plus Born to Fear: Interviews with Thomas Ligotti. It has accompanied me through the experience of being a guest of honor at Mo*Con III, giving interviews to various podcasts and radio shows, and serving as a reader and panelist at writing and genre conventions around the U.S. It has accompanied me through earning a Ph.D., serving as pianist at three different churches, and becoming a grandfather. It has accompanied me through losing several very close family members, including my father. It has been a presence for such a huge slice of my professional career, my adult life, and my creative arc that I honestly find it strange to think of it as no longer open for business.

And yet that’s the case. As of today, The Teeming Brain is officially closed. I’m not taking the site down, mind you. It will remain up and available indefinitely, standing as a record or archive of what I and many other people have thought, felt, and written. It will still be able to receive comments. My post about sleep paralysis and discarnate dark ones, for instance, which is the single most popular post I ever published here — currently 187,000 page views and counting — continues to draw comments regularly, most of them from people seeking advice about how to handle their own disturbing experiences of seeming supernatural nocturnal assault. This will all remain. But new content will not be published. From this moment, The Teeming Brain is done.

As may be apparent from this brief reminiscence, I’m feeling the distinct bite of nostalgia right now. I hope you have gotten something out of this site, this blog, whoever you are and however long you’ve been here.

I also hope you’ll join me for the next evolutionary stage of the impulse that led me to found The Teeming Brain in the first place. It is a newsletter titled Living into the Dark, and it will offer a wealth of ongoing content. Like TTB, Living into the Dark is a broad avenue for exploring a diverse set of interests. But it also features a core focus on the convergence of creativity, the daimon muse, religion/spirituality, supernatural and speculative fiction and film, and whatever new synthesis may arise from the interaction of all these and more.

I’ll see you there. To all my Teeming Brain readers over the past decade and a half: Thank you for your encouragement, your support, and your investment of time and self. Here’s to 16 more years.