Natalie Goldberg

Natalie Goldberg (born January 4, 1948, Brooklyn, New York) is an American writing teacher, Zen practitioner, painter, and author of sixteen books, best known for Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within (Shambhala, 1986), the book that introduced the world to writing practice as a form of meditation and changed how millions of people approach the page. It has sold more than two million copies and has been translated into nineteen languages. She received her B.A. in English literature from George Washington University and her M.A. in humanities from St. John's University, and has lived in northern New Mexico since 1970, currently in Santa Fe.

Writing Down the Bones is a series of short chapters, each three to five pages, on the daily discipline of writing as a form of Zen practice. The central technique is timed writing without lifting the pen, without crossing out, without judging, designed to bypass the inner editor and reach what Goldberg calls first thoughts. The book has been used as a foundation text in creative writing programs, twelve-step recovery groups, MBA programs, and monasteries for almost forty years.

Her companion writing books include Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life (Bantam, 1990), Thunder and Lightning: Cracking Open the Writer's Craft (Bantam, 2000), Old Friend from Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir (Free Press, 2007), and Writing on Empty (St. Martin's Press, 2024). Her memoirs include Long Quiet Highway: Waking Up in America (Bantam, 1993) about her years with her Zen teacher Dainin Katagiri Roshi, The Great Spring: Writing, Zen, and This Zigzag Life (Shambhala, 2016), and Let the Whole Thundering World Come Home (Shambhala, 2018), about her experience with cancer through the practice of Zen and writing. She has also written the novel Banana Rose (Bantam, 1995) and the haiku-pilgrimage book Three Simple Lines.

She has been a serious Zen practitioner since 1974 and trained with Dainin Katagiri Roshi from 1978 to 1984. She is also a painter whose work is collected in Living Color: Painting, Writing, and the Bones of Seeing (Abrams) and Top of My Lungs: Poems and Paintings, and is shown at the Ernesto Mayans Gallery on Canyon Road in Santa Fe. In 2006 she co-directed with Mary Feidt the documentary Tangled Up in Bob, about Bob Dylan's childhood on Minnesota's Iron Range. She continues to lead writing retreats and workshops across the country.