I’m seeking input from my Teeming Brain readers on a decision about my online future as a writer. On the one hand, I’m thinking of launching a Substack about the daimon muse. It would be a blog-slash-newsletter on the practical and philosophical work of triangulating the inner genius at the nexus of creativity, consciousness, and…
Tag: daemonic creativity
For Writers: Make a Place in Your Plan for the Irrational and Mysterious
Novelist Maria Mutch, writing for Literary Hub: Efficiency, rationalism, progress, all perfectly decent ideas that also call to mind the American highway-building madness of the 1950s, for instance, or the current financial paradigm of ceaseless and predictable growth, and which, left to overtake the novel-writing process, can obscure or squeeze out altogether what is mysterious…
Steven Pressfield: God Designed the World with Monsters. Your Daimon Is One of Them.
Steve Pressfield, in his book The Artist’s Journey: The human race lost something, I believe, when it passed from the ancient world to the modern. The ancients understood the monstrous. They were not appalled by it, as we are. The legends of the ancient world are packed with monsters — Medusa, Cerberus, the Minotaur. Even…
Tori Amos on serving the muses: “You have to get yourself out of the way”
With my long-running investigations into the experience of inspired creativity in the mode of the muse, the daimon/daemon, and the genius, I was interested to see this theme getting a big shout-out in the mainstream press in connection with the publication of Tori Amos’s new memoir, Resistance: A Songwriter’s Story of Hope, Change, and Courage….
R.I.P. Joe Pulver
I was saddened yesterday to learn of the death of Joe Pulver. Mike Davis, publisher of Lovecraft eZine, tweeted a link to a deeply moving Facebook update from Katrin Pulver, Joe’s wife, in which she had shared the news. Word of his passing has now circulated throughout the fairly close-knit community of horror readers, writers,…
My spiritual autobiography: A video interview
In 2017 I published an enthusiastic review of Jerry L. Martin’s God: An Autobiography here at The Teeming Brain, and also at Amazon. The book presents Martin’s account of being an atheist who was hit with an unexpected experience of what presented itself as divine communication. Over the course of about a year, he found…
Teeming Links – April 12, 2019
We currently live in divided and divisive times. Lately (meaning for the past two and a half years), I’ve been reading deeply in the literature about leadership for the PhD that I’m now close to finishing. And I’m here to say that it seems to me the following words from Robert Greenleaf’s classic 1970s essay…
My “Daemonyx” album available on YouTube
A few months ago I discovered that my entire Daemonyx album has been uploaded to YouTube by CD Baby. This is the same album that accompanied my Dark Awakenings collection when people bought it directly from the publisher, Mythos Books. In case you’d like to hear it: The whole thing seems strangely alien to me…
Terri Windling (and Lewis Hyde and Stephen King) on the care and feeding of daemons and muses
Some neat thoughts on inspired creativity drawn from Lewis Hyde and Stephen King, and presented by Terri Windling, whose editorial and authorial contributions to modern fantasy and speculative fiction have been so very valuable: As Hyde explained in his book, The Gift (1983): “The task of setting free one’s gifts was a recognized labor in…
Interview with James Fadiman: The Daemon and the Doors of Perception
Dr. James Fadiman Just published and now available here at The Teeming Brain: my interview/conversation with Dr. James Fadiman, one of the pioneers of transpersonal psychology and modern research into the spiritual and therapeutic applications of psychedelics. This has been a long time in coming, for reasons that I explain in the interview’s introduction. The…