Natalie Goldberg (b. 1948) is a poet, teacher, writer, and painter. She lived in Brooklyn until she was six, when her family moved out to Farmingdale, Long Island. She received a BA in English literature from George Washington University and an MA in humanities from St. John’s University. Her first book, Chicken and in Love, was published in 1980.
She is best known as the author of Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within (1986), which revolutionized the teaching and practice of writing in the United States. The book has sold more than one million copies and been translated into fourteen languages.
Goldberg has written numerous books that explore writing as Zen practice, including Wild Mind: Living the Writer’s Life (1990), Thunder and Lightning: Cracking Open the Writer’s Craft (2000), The Essential Writer’s Notebook (2001), The Great Failure: My Unexpected Path to Truth (2004), and Old Friend from Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir (2008). She has also published a novel, Banana Rose (1995), and two memoirs, Long Quiet Highway: Waking Up in America (1993) and The Great Failure: A Bartender, a Monk, and My Unlikely Path to Truth (2004).
Goldberg has been a Zen practitioner since 1974 and studied with Katagiri Roshi from 1978 until his death in 1990. She began writing and painting soon after beginning these studies. She is ordained in the Order of Interbeing with Thích Nhất Hạnh.
A dedicated instructor, Goldberg has taught writing and literature for more than thirty-five years. She also leads national workshops and retreats attended by people from around the world. 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.
Goldberg has painted for as long as she has written, and her paintings can be seen in Living Color: A Writer Paints Her World (1997) and Top of My Lungs: Poems and Paintings (2002). Top of My Lungs contains forty poems, twenty of her paintings in color, and an essay, “How Poetry Saved My Life.” Her paintings are on display at the Ernesto Mayans Gallery in Sante Fe, New Mexico, and at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House in Taos, New Mexico.
In 2006, Goldberg and filmmaker Mary Feidt completed a one-hour documentary, Tangled Up in Bob, about Bob Dylan’s childhood on the Iron Range in northern Minnesota.
Goldberg currently lives in northern New Mexico.
As a child, Natalie watches her grandpa write at the kitchen table. Natalie’s grandparents lived with her throughout her childhood. “They were the sun and the moon to me,” she says.
Natalie (right) at age five, playing outside her house with a friend on Easter Sunday. Natalie lived in Levittown, New York, from birth to kindergarten; soon after, her family moved several miles away to Farmingdale, where she lived until she turned eighteen.
Natalie smiles while posing with her father and sister in front of the family’s summerhouse in Twin Oaks, Long Island. Natalie and her younger sister, Rhoda, spent long afternoons picking wild blackberries that grew over the land.
Natalie age nine, writing while wearing her favorite white buck shoes. At nine, Natalie had no idea that writing would become her great love years later, at age twenty-four.
Natalie’s first real poem, written while she was in her early twenties. “It was the first poem where I trusted my own mind,” Natalie says. She first shared it with Rob Strell, the boyfriend with whom she had just broken up.
Natalie is also a prolific painter. Here, some of her very first paintings hangs on the wall behind her.
Natalie’s painting Red Truck in Boulder, 1977. Many of Natalie’s paintings were printed on postcards to celebrate and promote her treasured workshops around New Mexico.
Natalie with her ninety-four-year-old grandma. At the time of this photograph, the author had just returned home from a poetry fellowship in Israel.
Natalie, right, smiles while posing with her very best “writing friend,” Kate Green. “We wrote together every Monday night,” Natalie says.
Natalie in 1984, the year she wrote Writing Down the Bones.
Natalie’s home in New Mexico. From 1986 to 2003, she lived “off the grid,” in a completely solar-powered house made of beer cans and tires.
Natalie’s writing studio, where she wrote from 1993 to 2003. Over the years, her writing schedule has varied but when working on a book, she typically writes from nine in the morning until one in the afternoon.
Natalie and her mother at the beach in 1996. “My mother was beautiful and removed,” Natalie has said. “I took care of her a lot when I was older. I would drag her to the beach with my father, who is a champion swimmer.”
Natalie smiles in her Zen robe alongside a framed photograph of Katagiri Roshi, with whom she trained for twelve years. A student of Zen Buddhism for over twenty-five years, Natalie is ordained in the Order of Interbeing with Thích Nhất Hạnh.
Natalie, center, with filmmaker Mary Feidt and a friend of Bob Dylan’s in Hibbing, Minnesota. In 2004, Natalie traveled to Hibbing to explore Bob Dylan’s hometown and his roots in Feidt’s film Tangled Up in Bob.