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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Annelie Geissler
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Self-help, personal development & practical advice

WRITING ON EMPTY

Natalie Goldberg

Remembering What Matters

Bestselling author and teacher Natalie Goldberg shares her inspiring personal journey out of a devastating period of writer's block and back into a life of growth, creativity, and healing.

Author of the beloved multi-generational bestseller, Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg has spent her life teaching people to write -- and to break out of writer's block. So, she was shocked to suddenly find her own creativity blocked when the pandemic shut down her world. She couldn't write. She couldn't sit in meditation. The steady stream of creativity and inquisitiveness that had blessed her all her life abruptly dried up, vanished. What do we do when what always worked for us before doesn't work anymore? WRITING ON EMPTY: Remembering What Matters is Natalie's journey back to fullness. Ultimately, like all of us, Natalie had to create a new normal. Instead of sitting, she had to get moving. Instead of relying on the usual landmarks, places, and interactions that inspired her, she had to find new ones. And she had to revisit her memories, especially her fraught relationship with her mother, which had kept her from fully making peace with her past and living fully in the present - alive to any crisis. Through her own journey, Natalie also discovered that she had created a road map for others. A practical guide for finding one's voice - or rediscovering one's voice - appears at the end of the book, to help readers reconnect to their own creative source. This is the first time Natalie has included a writing guide in one of her books. With her characteristic humor and frankness, her distinctive observation and stories, Natalie drives through her own life, picking out what it matters to remember, and helping us to do the same. Natalie Goldberg is a poet, teacher, writer, and painter. A student of Zen Buddhism for 24 years, she trained intensively with Katagiri Roshi for 12 years, and is ordained in the Order of Interbeing with Thich Nhat Hanh. Natalie Goldberg teaches writing workshops nationally based on the methods presented in Writing Down the Bones. Her other books include Wild Mind; Long Quiet Highway; Banana Rose; and Living Color.

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Book Published 2024-07-09 by St. Martin's Essentials

Comments

Radically honest, deeply personal, and comforting. I wanted this book to continue on forever

With fierce honesty, feisty humor and relentless determination, one of the greatest teachers of our times uses her own process to show us the way to be so present in the fallow seasons that we cannot help but break through to a more vibrant intimacy with things as they are, and a renewed capacity for sharing them.

That Natalie Goldberg can write so vividly and with so much energy is proof that the writing practice she brought to us in Writing Down the Bones really does work. WRITING ON EMPTY is a wildly original, big-hearted, joyful book about the enduring power of friendship, hope, and writing to help us bear the burdens of a broken world. A must-read guide to breaking through life's inevitable tight spots with grace and brilliance.

Natalie Goldberg is a sensualist. She lives life deeply; sight and sound, taste and smell. She takes the reader on a felt journey, exploring the odd corners of her mind and their own. WRITING ON EMPTY reveals a life richly ledit invites the reader within us all to explore and expand their particular human experience.

WRITING ON EMPTY is far from being another book about writer's block. Zen wisdom teaches that underneath being is not being. Likewise, the underbelly of knowing is not knowing and perhaps the backbone of writing is not writing. Feeling as if there is nothing left to say or write about the writer Natalie Goldberg dives into that dark inner sky, exploring the invisible heartache of lost inspiration. Chasing a ghost of herself, she zigzags across the country and the landscapes of other writers, yearning to reconnect with her own vivid love affair with the written word. But it is the pandemic. It is the end of a world we once knew. And though writing will return, visceral and real, she does not know that yet. In this uncertain venture, we are invited to ride along with her. Laughing and crying, reaching out and letting go, we share her unique journey. Here as she travels the terrain of loss and longing, we experience Natalie at her most tender and exquisite

WRITING ON EMPTY is part memoir, part writing manual, and a full meditation on emptiness. Natalie Goldberg's pen stopped moving when covid stopped the world. This is a touching and powerful book detailing her struggle to find meaning and motivation during a desperate time. Even on empty, Goldberg's prose is at its finest as she shares her emotional and geographic terrain with the clarity, wisdom, heart, and humor we expect from this beloved writer

Writers waiting for the muse to strike will find comfort and plenty of useful tips.

A once-in-a-generation writing teacher, empowering her students to face their lives' pains and possibilities on the page, Natalie Goldberg has also long walked the walk. She is a magnetic storyteller. Here again, she draws us in close. We think we're opening a book about words running dry, but the rush of her language is a current that sweeps us away to many places and even back to ourselves

In this remarkable book, Natalie Goldberg's rich and wild mind brings us to the landscape of emptiness and then delivers us from sorrow.

This is true wisdom, and Natalie's true and remarkable gift. It's all here, the tangles of life, the beauty, suffering and hope - and new ways of opening to them, pen in hand. A must-read for anybody seeking to reconnect with their deeper life.