Natalie Goldberg

Natalie Goldberg (b. 1948) is an American author and teacher of creative writing. She is best known for a series of books which explore writing as a Zen practice.

Natalie Goldberg is a poet, teacher, writer, and painter. She was born in 1948 to Jewish parents of Polish ancestry, and was raised in Long Island. A student of Zen Buddhism for 24 years, she trained intensively with Dainin Katagiri for 12 years at the Minnesota Zen Center, and is ordained in the Order of Interbeing with Thich Nhat Hanh. Natalie Goldberg teaches writing workshops based on the methods first presented in her best-selling book, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within.

Her other books include Wild Mind (an expansion of the ideas about writing that she first expressed in Writing Down The Bones); Long Quiet Highway (a memoir of her lifelong search for a spiritual teacher and her eventual taking refuge in Buddhism); Banana Rose (a novel); Living Color; Thunder and Lightning (an exploration of what to do with the writing that is generated through writing practice); and most recently The Great Failure (a memoir of coming to terms with her legacies from her father and from her Zen teacher).

Goldberg finds writing practice to be analogous to zazen, or Zen meditation. In writing practice, the aim is to simply write - and to keep writing for a whole timed writing period. There are no goals regarding quality or content. Goldberg states: “The idea is to keep your hand moving for, say, ten minutes, and don’t cross anything out, because that makes space for our inner editor to come in.”

In recent years, Goldberg's teachings have come to emphasize Katagiri Roshi's three main teachings:

• Continue under all circumstances.
• Don't be tossed away.
• Make positive effort for the good.

Goldberg’s approach has been compared to Julia Cameron’s morning pages, popularized in The Artists’ Way.

Goldberg lives in and teaches primarily in Taos, New Mexico.

Books

• Writing Down the Bones, ISBN 0-87773-375-9
• Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life
• Thunder and Lightning
• The Great Failure
• Top of My Lungs
• Long Quiet Highway
• Banana Rose
• Living Color
• The Essential Writer's Notebook