Natalie Goldberg Biography Quotes 9 Report mistakes

Early Life and First Steps toward Writing
Natalie Goldberg, an American writer born in 1948, became known for uniting the discipline of Zen with the craft of writing. From an early age she kept notebooks, sensing that words could help her make sense of experience. The urge to record and to notice would become the through-line of her career. Her family life, especially the presence of her father, a bartender whose work and temperament she later explored in depth, gave her a complex lens on human character and vulnerability. That intimacy with everyday detail primed her to see writing as a way to pay attention to the world without flinching.

Zen Practice and the Teacher Who Shaped Her
Goldberg's path clarified when she encountered Zen Buddhism and became a dedicated student of Dainin Katagiri Roshi, a Japanese Zen master who taught in the American Midwest. Training with Katagiri Roshi for years anchored her life in a daily meditation practice. She sat long hours, absorbed the subtle rigor of zazen, and learned to treat the mind with steadiness rather than melodrama. Katagiri's guidance was decisive: he encouraged her to write as a parallel discipline to sitting, not as a separate career pursuit but as a practice that could reveal the mind just as meditation does. Her relationship with him was a deep apprenticeship and, later, a source of hard reflection. She honored his influence while also confronting complicated truths about teachers and authority, a reckoning she explored publicly and with candor.

Writing Down the Bones and a New Approach to the Craft
The synthesis of meditation and creative work crystallized in Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within. The book presented a deceptively simple method known as writing practice: set a timer, keep the hand moving, do not cross out, follow the mind wherever it goes, and allow the rawness of first thoughts to appear on the page. These instructions drew from the discipline she learned from Katagiri Roshi, and they resonated with countless readers. Editors at Shambhala Publications helped bring the book to a wide audience, and it became a long-lived bestseller, translated into many languages and embraced by classrooms, writing groups, and solitary practitioners.

Teaching and Community
Goldberg evolved into a master teacher. She led workshops and silent writing retreats across the United States and abroad, often in the high-desert light of northern New Mexico where she made her home. Her rooms filled with aspiring writers, teachers, therapists, and artists who used writing to unstick the imagination and steady the mind. Those students became a crucial part of her life, and she often credits their courage on the page for shaping her pedagogy. In retreat settings she wove sitting meditation, slow walking, timed notebook sessions, and simple talks into a coherent rhythm so people could meet their own minds without distraction. Fellow writers, Zen practitioners, and local arts communities clustered around her work, and she maintained a long dialogue with editors, translators, and event organizers who helped her carry the practice outward.

A Body of Work Beyond Bones
After Writing Down the Bones, Goldberg expanded and refined her approach in Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life, Thunder and Lightning: Cracking Open the Writer's Craft, Old Friend from Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir, and The True Secret of Writing. These books vary in tone, but all insist that practice, not inspiration, sustains the writer. She also wrote a novel, Banana Rose, and explored her life with teachers and family in Long Quiet Highway: Waking Up in America and The Great Failure: A Bartender, a Monk, and My Unlikely Path to Truth. The bartender in the title is her father, whose complicated presence shaped her sense of loyalty, disappointment, and love; the monk is Katagiri Roshi, whose humanity, including its flaws, she examined without denial. That honesty modeled a mature relationship to influence: gratitude without idealization.

Painting and the Discipline of Seeing
Parallel to writing, Goldberg has a sustained practice as a painter. She often describes painting as another form of timed attention, a way to catch the immediacy of color, light, and shape without polishing the life out of the image. Her book Living Color: A Writer Paints Her World chronicles this second studio life and shows how looking can be a form of meditation. The New Mexico landscape and its stark geometries gave her a vocabulary of forms that seeped back into her prose: spare, exact, and open.

Illness, Continuity, and Later Work
In later years Goldberg faced serious illness and wrote about it in Let the Whole Thundering World Come Home. The book traces treatment, fear, and the dailiness of recovery, honoring the doctors, nurses, friends, and students who showed up for her. Rather than casting illness as an enemy, she approached it as another teacher of impermanence. Throughout, she continued to hold retreats, to read student work attentively, and to correspond with readers who found solace and courage in her methods.

Method, Ethics, and Influence
Goldberg's core contribution is the repositioning of writing as a spiritual-physical practice rooted in stamina and curiosity. The technique of timed, unedited notebook sessions has influenced creative writing classrooms, therapy practices, and community programs. She urges writers to get specific, to welcome the ordinary, and to remain faithful to the body's pace. She also insists on ethical clarity: to tell the truth on the page even when it complicates one's view of mentors or parents. The people most central to her story are her Zen teacher, Dainin Katagiri Roshi, whose training gave her the backbone of practice; her father, whose life in bars and neighborhoods taught her about human heat and contradiction; and her wide circle of students and colleagues who returned year after year to sit, walk, and write alongside her.

Continuing Presence
From her home base in New Mexico, Goldberg has kept a steady rhythm of teaching, painting, and publishing. She remains a visible and generous presence at readings and retreats, answering questions with the plainness that characterizes her prose. Across decades she has built not just a bibliography but a community. The notebook, the cushion, and the brush are her tools; the discipline of attention is her constant theme. In connecting Zen practice to the everyday labor of sentences, she offered an enduring pathway for people who want to write not only to produce work, but to wake up.

Our collection contains 9 quotes who is written by Natalie, under the main topics: Motivational - Truth - Writing - Live in the Moment - Book.