I’m Nirmala Nataraj, a New York–based writer, editor, book midwife, theater artist, and mythmaker. Welcome to my site, which is the crossroads between your creativity, life force, and personal fulfillment via the portals of myth, storytelling, word magic, and collective liberation!
As someone who has woven in and out of a number of different word realms—nonprofit communications, advertising, theatre, publishing, and community arts, to name a few—I know that liberation is possible through the stories we choose to tell. As a first-generation South Asian American, I myself exist in the liminal spaces between cultures, art forms, and languages, and it is this multiplicity of narratives that informs my personal and professional approach.
I am the author of four bestselling books about space and cosmology, the ghostwriter of a dozen works (primarily in the arena of transformational nonfiction and works that emphasize the connection between mental health and healing our inner and outer narratives), and a book development editor who lovingly stewards my clients from planting the seeds for their stories to watching them burgeon and flourish in the world. My zeal for storytelling and mythmaking, wedded with previous work as an activist and counselor, has led me to craft a variety of books about overcoming addiction and the loneliness epidemic, and moving beyond self-help and into collective liberation. My strengths, passions, and areas of interest include subjects as varied as the cultural effects of technology, public art, sustainable architecture, sexuality, ecology, performance studies, and what it means to seed revolutionary acts of beauty in a world steeped in suffering and injustice.
I believe that every book has its own spirit, and it’s up to us to simply get out of the way and do whatever is necessary to usher that spirit into form. Some of the guides on my journey include: irreverence, play, the incantatory power of words, the gifts of the more-than-human realm, and the grace of falling apart and dispensing with preconceived notions about what creativity and power are supposed to look like. Oh yeah, and tons of plant tinctures, organic skincare, responsibly sourced green tea, and Epsom salt baths!
My colleagues include New York Times–bestselling authors, spiritual teachers, social changemakers and shit starters, mushrooms, trees, and some particularly talkative chipmunks who come to visit me during the golden hours before dusk, when I am most creatively potent.
In all my work, I emphasize the power of claiming authority over our voices and personal truths, while also surrendering to the creative process and ceding control and ownership over it.
I am committed to steadfast creative inquiry (I dig questions more than answers) and new definitions of self and community that work to dismantle heteropatriarchal/colonialist/misogynist/racist frameworks about whose words matter and how they should be arranged on a page or stage. As a multi-genre collaborator and creative facilitator, I believe in messiness, multiplicity, competing and coalescing narratives, generativity in the midst of strife, the coexistence of love and justice, and breathtaking beauty as a natural consequence of this wild ride.
Aside from all this, I'm trained in a variety of methods of narrative-based collective healing, including Family Constellations, Psychodrama, and Playback Theatre. In terms of what I'm up to creatively and communally, I'm really interested in how restorative practices, ancestral reckoning, and the reclamation of embodied wisdom can serve as pathways to both personal and collective repair. And I honestly believe that good books and good art are some of the most important forms of repair we can engage in! Some of the passions I bring to my writing and facilitation include guided visualization, the induction of visionary states, and the cultivation of radical intimacy with the human and more-than-human worlds. You can check out more of my passions at my Substack, The Diving Bell Spider.
