That Glow, That Yes!
Natalie Goldberg, Thunder and Lightning: Cracking Open the Writer’s Craft 30 September 2000 It’s clear to me today, anyway, that my Holy Contour of Life book will be a structure like Natalie’s: short, compressed, easy…
Tag: Natalie Goldberg
Writing to Wake Up: A Course in Creativity and Community
Think about it: Even with all our sophisticated technologies and modes of communication, who feels as though there is enough time? And yet, we need time, as community activist Grace Lee Boggs has said, to…
The Good News, 3.8.2017
I once asked Mayuko and Minami (both in my fall 8 a.m. MWF Humanities class) if they had heard of Sei Shōnagon (清少納言). Of course they had! They had read her years ago in school. …
Writing Topics
Mary told me she spent a Sunday rereading the notebook she kept in Social Justice class 4.5 years ago. She was rejuvenated to start writing more, so I sent her these topics, after consulting Natalie Goldberg’s…
Writing to Wake Up
1. Natalie Goldberg: I also place on the altar a photo of Allen Ginsberg in a yellow wood frame, sitting in a white shirt, cross-legged, his face captured in an uncanny smile. He is our…
This I Know Is True
If you stay in relation to writing (rather than zoning out for six years) and you connect with writing friends, read, listen deeply, you will write what you want but most likely never the way…
Walking Together without Fear: Reading and Writing with Alice Walker
Author of many books, most famously The Color Purple, Alice Walker is one of the most renowned writers who came of age during the 1960s in this country. Now in her early seventies, she continues to produce…
One-Liners Randomly Culled from My Marked-up Copy of Natalie Goldberg’s Writing down the Bones
I have taught over 100 courses since 2001, and I assigned Writing down the Bones in almost all of them. I never tire of hearing the students read aloud her chapters, which contain lines like the following……
Tao of Writing
“When you accept writing as what you are supposed to do, after you’ve tried everything else–marriage, hippiedom, traveling, living in Minnesota or New York, teaching, spiritual practices–there’s finally no place to go.” –Natalie Goldberg, Writing…
Writing Meditation: A Course Inspired by the Work of Thich Nhat Hanh
“Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child–our own two eyes. All is a miracle.” “I…