Natalie Goldberg

Bestselling Writer & Poet
Writing Down the Bones

Readings &
Lecture Topics
  • Writing Down the Bones
  • Wild Mind
  • The Great Failure
  • Zen & the Art of Writing
  • An Evening with Natalie Goldberg

Biography

“Wild mind isn’t just your mind; it’s the whole world moving through you. With it, you give voice to a very large life, even though you might only be talking about your grandmother’s closet with its particular wallpaper and floor. It’s an awareness of everything through one thing.” —Natalie Goldberg, Interview in the Sun

Natalie Goldberg teaches people to fall in love with their life. She is an author, poet, teacher, and painter, for whom the writing and spiritual lives are interconnected. She has written fourteen books, including Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within (1986), which broke open the world of creativity and started a revolution in the way we practice writing in this country. The book has sold over a million and a half copies and has been translated into fourteen languages. In the sequel book, Wild Mind, Goldberg continues to teach her method of writing by taking the writer beyond craft to the true source of creative power: the wild mind that is “raw, full of energy, alive and hungry.” In Thunder and Lighting, Goldberg takes us on to the next step in the writing process: turning our flashes of inspiration—”the thunder and lightning of creation”—into a polished piece of work. In The True Secret of Writing: Connecting Life with Language (2013), Goldberg provides a fresh new insight into writing accessible to all readers and in her most recent book The Great Spring: Writing, Zen, and This Zigzag Life, Goldberg shares vivid moments that have awakened her to new ways of being.

As a memoirist, Goldberg takes us into her study and practice of Zen Buddhism. In Long Quiet Highway: Waking Up in America, she captures both the moments of illumination and the long discipline of daily practice, the hilarity of error and the grief of our resistance to change. She is also the author of The Great Failure: My Unexpected Path to Truth and her most recent the memoir Let the Whole Thundering World Come Home (2018), a clear-looking memoir on being in love with your life even when life brings illness..

Her other books include the novel Banana Rose; Living Color: A Writer Paints Her World, about painting as a second art form; Top of My Lungs, containing forty poems, twenty of her paintings in color, and an essay, “How Poetry Saved My Life.”

With the filmmaker Mary Feidt, she completed the documentary Tangled Up In Bob, about Bob Dylan’s childhood on the Iron Range in northern Minnesota. She is “surprised to find his songs in the dirt, the swamps, the iron mines, in the flatness, poplar trees, bars, and gas stations. She discovers the seeds of his creativity in his ordinary childhood…and most importantly she learns the secret of coming home.” —tangledupinbob.com

Goldberg has been teaching seminars in writing as a practice for the last thirty years. People from around the world attend her life-changing workshops, and she has a reputation as a great teacher. The Oprah Winfrey Show sent a film crew to spend the day with Natalie for a segment on spirituality that covered her writing, teaching, painting, and walking meditation. Her lively paintings can be viewed at the Ernesto Mayans gallery on Canyon Road in Santa Fe. She currently lives in northern New Mexico.

Short Bio

Natalie Goldberg is the author of fourteen books, including Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within, which has sold over a million and a half copies and been translated into fourteen languages. Her latest book is Let the Whole Thundering World Come Home. She is also the author of The Great SpringBanana Rose; Living Color: A Writer Paints Her World; and Top of My Lungs, containing forty poems, twenty of her paintings in color, and an essay, “How Poetry Saved My Life.” With the filmmaker Mary Feidt, she completed the documentary Tangled Up In Bob, about Bob Dylan’s childhood on the Iron Range in northern Minnesota.

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