THE SCHOLAR BEHIND THE WORK
Tanner Menard
I'm a poet, composer, and scholar completing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where my dissertation, Numalia: Visionary Poetics as Relational Ceremony, builds a framework for reading the formal traces a visionary experience leaves in language. I've presented that research at academic conferences and regularly lead writing workshops at distinguished venues. I've published a book of poetry — The Poet (Post Asemic Press), with Moniker forthcoming — and released fourteen albums of sound and music, with work published internationally. Alongside the scholarship, I was trained by Harmanjot Kaur to document teachings from the Library of Teachings—skills I use to document the teachings of Yogi Amandeep Singh, who authorized me to teach within the Kundalini and Udāsīn–Nirmalā lineages. One concern runs through all of it: how a state of consciousness gets carried inside a form — a poem, a piece of music, a teaching — and how to keep it faithfully when it moves from the living moment onto the page. That's the sensibility I bring to the work below.
A working bibliography you can build on.
Over the course of my doctoral research I assembled an open, working bibliography spanning yoga, tantra and Śaivism, nonduality and Advaita Vedānta, Sikh Dharma and Kundalini, the Udāsīn and Nirmalā sampradāyas, parapsychology and near-death studies, Sufism, Christian mysticism, and the modern consciousness-primary currents that cross them. It's shared, and it's meant to be used.
Use it as a map for your own research, a vetted reading list for a course or a book, the starting scaffold for a literature review, or the grounding for serious lineage-based scholarship. Find the door you need — and if you want help walking through it, that's what the work below is for.
Read the working bibliography →How I can help
Source Work
Yogic research
Tracing practices, kriyas, mantras, and teachings back to their actual sources — the texts, the lineages, the where-it-really-came-from. For teachers, writers, and institutions who want their work grounded in something real rather than repeated secondhand.
In Your Voice
Ghostwriting
Writing in your voice — books, essays, contemplative and scholarly texts — with the depth and care the material asks for.
Rigorous Tools
AI-assisted research
Using current tools rigorously and transparently to accelerate literature review, source-gathering, and synthesis — without sacrificing scholarly integrity. I've presented on AI in academic writing; I treat it as an instrument, not a shortcut.
Developmental
Manuscript & editorial consultation
Developmental and structural work on contemplative books, poetry collections, and scholarly manuscripts — reading at the depth where the writing is actually doing what it wants to do.
$150 per hour
Ongoing engagements arranged by conversation; sliding scale considered for serious work.
Before anything else — a letter. Write, and let's talk.
Inquire →