Banana Rose (43 page)

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.