This lovely authorial vision from Flaubert is also applicable to life as lived within the nondual understanding of self and world (which is where I myself live): It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man…
Author: Matt Cardin
Teeming Brain founder and editor Matt Cardin is the author of DARK AWAKENINGS, DIVINATIONS OF THE DEEP, A COURSE IN DEMONIC CREATIVITY: A WRITER'S GUIDE TO THE INNER GENIUS, and TO ROUSE LEVIATHAN. He is also the editor of BORN TO FEAR: INTERVIEWS WITH THOMAS LIGOTTI and the academic encyclopedias MUMMIES AROUND THE WORLD; GHOSTS, SPIRITS, AND PSYCHICS: THE PARANORMAL FROM ALCHEMY TO ZOMBIES; and HORROR LITERATURE THROUGH HISTORY.
Creative illness as a liminal shamanistic transformation
Here’s a necessary passage from George P. Hansen’s 1994 opus The Trickster and the Paranormal, which is a flatly necessary book (though one that’s oddly semi-obscure, for reasons that have long eluded me): [Anthropologist Larry] Peters recognized that the idea of creative illness, advanced by Henri Ellenberger in 1964, can be understood as a liminal…
WHAT THE DAEMON SAID: Cover, TOC, and Publication Date
Today I received word from Hippocampus Press that my nonfiction collection What the Daemon Said: Essays on Weird Fiction, Film, and Philosophy is scheduled for publication on April 26. Preorders are available now. The beautiful cover is by Dan Sauer. Click to order. BLURBS: “For my money, Matt Cardin is the most interesting voice in…
The Myth of Persephone and the Cycle of Creativity
Rembrandt, The Rape of Proserpina, 1632 (public domain, via Wikimedia Commons) In typing up my life journal from 1993 to the present, I’ve been coming across hundreds of thousands of words that I forgot I ever wrote. Some of these take the form of excursive, semi-extemporaneous mini-essays. Here’s one of them. I won’t be including…
“Everything in this mansion is a horror”
Yesterday I posted the transcript of a nightmare that I suffered in 2003 and recorded in my personal journal, which I’m currently turning into a manuscript for publication later this year. I characterized that nightmare as the most narratively developed dream that I’ve ever experienced. Today, in the interest of accuracy, I’ll point out that…
A nightmare that was better than the story I made from it
The idea of publishing my 30-year private journal that I recently mentioned here is becoming a reality. The first volume will be published later this year by S. T. Joshi’s Sarnath Press. For weeks I’ve been typing like mad to produce a manuscript from mounds of old notebooks. And I’ve been coming across many things…
Dreams and Demons in Modern Horror Fiction
The quoted text below appears in the 2002 book Demons of the Modern World by Malcolm McGrath, who was a doctoral candidate in political philosophy at Oxford University when he wrote it. The publisher’s marketing copy lays out the book’s thrust: This fascinating discussion of modern demonology focuses on our ability to differentiate the physical…
Writing a Novel: Slow, Underwhelming, One Sentence at a Time
A rather neat novelist origin story from science writer Sara Goudarzi, author of the soon-to-be-published The Almond in the Apricot. Her insights into the creative process and the writer’s craft that she had to learn when transitioning from writing science journalism to prose fiction ring true: While I wrote several science articles a week, a…
On ditching your phone and social media to achieve your potential
From The Wall Street Journal: Chen delivered a rapturous free program with five quadruple jumps here on Thursday to win the men’s individual gold medal for the United States, avenging his devastatingly uneven performance at the Olympics four years ago in the grandest way and reigniting a conversation about whether he’s the greatest figure skater…
Video essay: Thomas Ligotti and the Polish Avant-Garde
Last summer I became aware of this rather brilliant video essay by Sam Pulham, co-host of the Sherds Podcast, “a literary discussion programme exploring the peripheries of world literature and unearthing neglected texts from outside the mainstream canon.” Pulham’s thesis is that the weird supernatural-horrific sensibility that infuses and defines Ligotti’s 2006 fiction collection Teatro…