Victoria Nelson’s On Writer’s Block: A New Approach to Creativity has long been one of the core entries in my library of books on writing and the creative process. Now I’m fascinated to see Brandon Taylor, author of the widely acclaimed novel Real Life and the just-released fiction collection Filthy Animals, talking about his own…
Tag: victoria nelson
Horror Movies, Transcendence, and a Symbiosis between the Demonic and the Divine
Here’s Will H. Rockett, in his book Devouring Whirlwind: Terror and Transcendence in the Cinema of Cruelty, saying things that affected and influenced me deeply in the 1990s when I was first divining the nexus of responsiveness that I had recognized within myself to intimations of religious transcendence both divine and demonic, beatific and horrifying,…
To Cleanse the Doors of Conception: Psychic Dreams, Scientific Monsters, and Transcendent Realities
Dream researcher, Teeming Brain friend, and future Teeming Brain contributor Ryan Hurd — who has spoken about dreams, consciousness, sleep paralysis, and related matters at Stanford, Yale, UC Berkeley, the Rhine Center, and elsewhere — recently shared an account of an apparently precognitive dream that he personally experienced. As I was reading through it, in…
Horror, meaning, and madness: Dangers of lifting the cosmic veil
(Liminalities, Cycle 1, Part 2) In my novelette “Teeth” — first published at Thomas Ligotti Online, then in The Children of Cthulhu, and then in expanded form in my Dark Awakenings — there’s a scene where the narrator reads a notebook filled with ruminations on the convergence of philosophy and religion with cosmic horror, all interwoven…