Frontispiece to Frankenstein (1831 edition). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. On a morning when I’ve just finished up with several days of responding to publisher copy edits on Ghosts, Spirits, and Psychics, I’m happy to announce the birth of another book project: I have just signed a contract with the same publisher (ABC-CLIO) to edit…
Category: Writing & Creativity
Interview with novelist T. M. Wright: Creativity, the muse, and finding your writer’s voice
When I took down the Demon Muse site in 2012, this did away with the couple of interviews that I had conducted for the site. A few weeks ago I republished the one with John Langan here. Now the circle is complete, because here’s the resurrection of my interview/conversation with T. M. Wright: An Unleashed…
That Occulted Part of Ourselves: Interview with John Langan
John Langan John Langan is a professor, a literary scholar, and the author of the superlatively excellent supernatural horror collections Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Tales and The Wide Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies, as well as the equally excellent supernatural horror novel House of Windows. In 2010 I interviewed him for Demon Muse. Then in…
Is the unconscious the door through which the divine speaks?
From an engaging discussion of Julian Jaynes’ bicameral mind theory by writer and philosophy commentator Jules Evans, at his website Philosophy for Life: Iâm particularly interested in the link between voice-hearing, dissociation and creativity, and in the incidence of voice-hearing among creative individuals like novelists Marilynne Robinson (who occasionally hears a voice inspiring her novels),…
Entering the fictive dream: The shamanistic, alchemical approach to writing
Andre Dubus III In On Becoming a Novelist â one of my favorite books about writing â John Gardner emphasizes the centrality of the âfictive dream,â the mental-imaginal movie that novelists are tasked with entering as deeply as possible so that they can channel it onto the page and thus recreate it in the imagination of the…
Ray Bradbury: A life of mythic numinosity
Long-time Teeming Brain readers are well aware that Ray Bradbury frequently comes up in conversation here. Like so many other people, and as I detailed three years ago in “The October Mystique: 7 Authors on the Visionary Magic of Ray Bradbury,” I tend to think of him especially when October and the autumn season roll…
Looking for a still point amid our digital cacophony? Consider writing in longhand.
From the late 1980s to the early 2000s, I kept a longhand journal. It was where I learned the sound of my own inner voice and the rhythm of my own thoughts, and where I gained a more conscious awareness and understanding of the ideas, subjects, emotions, and themes that are, through sheer force of gravitational…
Marilynne Robinson on writing, scientism, and trusting “the peripheral vision of the mind”
Here’s Marilynne Robinson being interviewed last June for Vice magazine by a writer who was fresh from having studied under her in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. As usual, Ms. Robinson’s displays considerable insight and elegance as she talks about the inner life of the writer and the outer life of a surrounding society that is…
The muse, the brain, and Behaviorists vs. Daemonicists: On inspiration and creative writing
Two recent articles focusing on the question of the creative muse and its real or imaginary nature crossed my radar recently. Oddly, they appeared within two days of each other The first appears at Pacific Standard and comes from the pen of independent journalist Brandon Sneed. Its title gets right to the point: “The Muse:…
‘A Course in Demonic Creativity: A Writer’s Guide to the Inner Genius’ (Free ebook)
A COURSE IN DEMONIC CREATIVITY is a writer’s guide to working with the muse, daimon, or genius — the inner “other” that feels like a separate, autonomous intelligence.