Books by Jim Gold

Infant Vision. . .2026

Running Wild on the Lawn. . .2026

Dancing Beyond Covid. . .2023-24
Dancing Out Of Covid. . .2022-23
Dancing Through Covid. . . 2019-22

Carlos the Cloud. . . 2020

A Treasury of International Folk Dances. . .2019

Handfuls of Air. . .2013Zany. . . 2012

Mad Shoes (The only folkdance novel ever written) . . . 1987

New Leaf Journal (5 Volumes) plus Selected Readings. . .2001-2005

Prologue

An artist

Cannot be afraid to jump

Off a cliff

Into the dark, churning abyss;

To fall down, down, down

Into black, mysterious waters

And drink from turbulent streams

Of Creativity.

Introduction

It takes courage to turn over a new leaf, to make each day a new adventure, and to have fun doing it!

That’s what Jim Gold does, out of his home office in Teaneck, New Jersey,

the headquarters of Jim Gold International. There, he plans his international folk tours, folk dance classes,

guitar concerts, and Mad Shoe Weekends, and, most important, writes his New Leaf journal.

Since 1994, when he began his “Miracle Schedule” habit of morning writing, guitar playing, running, yoga,

and language study, he’s written thousands of journal pages.

Jim writes about what he knows best–the joys and frustrations of making a living as an artist,

and the adventures of creating each day anew. His journals, which have been published in five volumes,

are filled with humor, beauty, and imagination. Also a brutally honest road, it reveals his frustrations and anxieties

about tour registrations, playing wrong notes on the guitar, aches, and worries about money. 

It’s also about having faith, and having fun.

A New Leaf is a compilation of the best of Jim’s published journal writings.

This book is a gold mine. Jim loved writing it; I loved compiling it, and you’ll love reading it!

Carol Karels

Jim adds:

“Writing my journal is the most important thing I do each day. Writing, along with my “Miracle Schedule,”

remind me of the spiritual foundation of my life and put me in touch with higher forces. 

My journal writing centers me. It represents the physical, mental, and spiritual aspects of my development t

hrough the adventures of a wandering mind. Even though I’m the author, I use it as my own guidebook to life.

Perhaps it will inspire you to jump in and splash around in this pool of creativity called life.

Ultimately, it’s all about having fun while following your star.

I was brought up in the Bronx in New York City. My mother was an artist. My father was a high school principal.

Music, the arts, and pursuit of knowledge were their passions. I still see myself as a child, listening to the radio in our kitchen,

eating Cheerios, and feeling my mind melt as I listened to the music of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky on WQXR.

Stars, suns, moons, and other celestial forms passed above me. Mozart, Wienawski, Beethoven, Lalo, Bruch, Bach.

Playing their music on my violin and listening to their symphonies; those were my highest moments.

The gate opened; they ushered me into a world where gods dwelt.

The High School of Music and Art introduced me to music and the epiphany of sound. On violin, and later on guitar,

I played other people’s music. I was their instrument—loving, willing, but instrument nonetheless.

Classical music, though beautiful, was filled with restrictions— do’s and dont’s, and endless possibilities

of making mistakes. How could I be free when I constantly worried about committing such a wrong-note crime

and facing the judgement of an audience?

College introduced me to the beauty and magic of the printed word. Once I read about ideas,

I knew music alone wasn’t enough. Dry intellect never held me. It was the beauty of ideas,

the tasty morsels of words, and the rolling language forming in my mouth, that inspired me. 

During my last year at the University of Chicago, as I sat in my second floor apartment on 55th Street,

I first thought of becoming a writer.  Writing had music and sound; it touched my intellect as well as my soul.

Most of all, it had freedom. When I wrote, I could finally express myself.

I spent a year in France, then rented a room in Greenwich Village. For the next three years, I wrote.

It was the beginning of a thirty-year experiment to find the source of my creativity and the reason

I passed through states of melancholy. Why should this be, when music and the presence of others lifted me so high?

Did it point to an aspect of self I didn’t quite know yet?

I discovered yoga after college, when I bought a book on it in Woodstock with a picture of a yogi standing on his head.

I figured I would read it, learn yoga, and, as a joke, teach it to the guests at Chaits Hotel in the Catskills,

where I worked as a social director. I taught it in the afternoons, always reading up

and staying a chapter ahead of my class.

To my surprise, not only did the guests like it, but I did, too.

I started practicing the postures.

Soon they became a habit, part of my daily routine. I liked the yoga philosophy, too. . . a

nd the sensual quality of the asanas.

Yoga is an offshoot of my love of movement, which, as a child, was expressed in the physical exhilaration

of running wild on our farm lawn before a storm or, as a teenager, playing basketball.

That’s also why I teach folk dancing and run. I feel the musical high

of a Beethoven symphony coursing through me.

Since I married, I’ve made my living as a performer.

First was my “World of Guitar” performances on college campuses nationwide.

In the late seventies, I began teaching folk dancing.

My Jim Gold International Folk Tours company followed soon after.

Writing is my key to self-understanding.

Its adventure continues to amaze me.”

Amazon.com : A New Leaf: Adventures in the Creative Life Jim Gold

Mad Shoes. . . 1987

Running Wild on the Lawn 2026

A celebration of freedom, imagination,
memory, and the irrepressible desire
to shine (remain) fully alive

There comes a time when the sensible path no longer seems sufficient. The lawn is waiting. The gate is open. And somewhere within us, the child who once ran without hesitation is still ready to begin again. Running Wild on the Lawn is Jim Gold’s newest book—an invitation to step beyond caution, abit, and limitation and rediscover the energy, humor, beauty, and wonder that make life worth living.

About the Book
In Running Wild on the Lawn, Jim Gold reflects on the struggle between restraint and freedom, age and vitality, fear and movement, seriousness and delight. With warmth, honesty, humor, and imagination, he explores what it means to keep moving toward life—even when the body hesitates, the mind worries, or the world encourages us to become smaller.  This is a book about more than running. It is about awakening. It is about refusing to disappear. It is about the moments when the spirit suddenly breaks free and remembers that it was born to move, create, laugh, love, and participate in the world.

Dancing Beyond Covid. . . 2023-24

IN THIS THIRD AND FINAL VOLUME of his memoirs
of the Covid years, Jim Gold considers how the pandemic
changed him in ways he barely realized when he wrote Dancing Out Of Covid. Then, overjoyed by the realization, not only that he had survived the plague, but that his livelihood of leading folk tours of the world had recuperated as well. Then, little by little,
Jim came to understand how the impact
of Covid-19 had transformed all his activities—his leadership of folkdance groups, his relationship to the guitar, his esoteric studies, and his writing. Join him on this absorbing journey and discover
how the pandemic altered his thinking, his passion,
and his understanding of his life’s path.

Dancing Out Of Covid…2022-23

When Jim Gold published Dancing Through Covid, 
millions of people had already died of the pandemic,
his folk-dance tours had ground to a halt,
and no one knew when-or if-life
would get back to normal.
This book shows how Jim’s career survived,
and how, during those dark months,
he emerged as a more complete human being than ever.
It’s a deeply inspiring tale
of renewal and growth.

Read sample pages
Purchase at Amazon.com
Kindle $5.99   Paperback $16.95

Dancing Through Covid. . .2019-22

Like so many of us,
Jim Gold spent
the Covid-19 pandemic years
in enforced isolation,
with most of his professional life
on hold or vanished with no foreseeable end in sight.
But he’s also written five volumes of New Leaf journals,
as his fans all know,
and he continued to write them
in his intense, personal way,
straight through this gloomy period, with surprisingly uplifting results-
finding in our despair a clear light
of emotional transcendence.
Read this book and join him.

Read sample pages
Purchase at Amazon.com
Kindle $5.99   Paperback $14.95

Carlos the Cloud

                 Carlos the Cloud

Jim Gold excels as a writer in the joys of improbability. His stories seize upon the most unlikely of heroes and heroines, and plunge them into situations none of us could ever imagine. They come to us with a hilarious assortment of odd backgrounds, very strange attitudes, and utterly surprising needs and ambitions. Some of them are people. Some are animals, and others plants. There are guys and gals who worry about their sex lives or their deaths, a talking turnip, a cloud with Oedipal problems, a whole world of vivid creations. And they’re all inescapable, irresistible–a tangle of living neurons and flesh we can’t help but be drawn to because they so often, and so surprisingly, remind us of ourselves. These invented souls hint of our own needs, our own frailties. . .and our own triumphs. They will leave you a happier soul.

Zany!

                            Zany!

Wildly off-beat, whimsical, humorous, and philosophical, here is an adventure story to engross the mind, warm the heart, and quicken the imagination.  World-renowned concert violinist Zoltan Zany has been sitting in his living room armchair for an entire year, contemplating—with the help of his unconventional friends and Austrian housekeeper—the future direction of his life. Meanwhile, his etymologist son, Attila, along with an Israeli linguist and archaeologist named Isaac Mashugi, is traveling—in search of the first word uttered by man—to eastern Turkey’s Mount Ararat, where they believe this original ur-word can be found by discovering Noah’s ark. they are joined there by the elder Zany. They discover the word and, on a quest for further adventure, return to America to launch a new kind of travel business—Posthumous tours, specializing in dead customers and raising funds by selling reincarnation insurance. Here is an adventure story to engross the mind, warm the heart, and quicken the imagination. 

Read sample pages 
Purchase at Amazon.com   
Kindle $9.99   Paperback $15.95

Mad Shoes
The Adventures of Sylvan Woods from Bronx Violinist to Bulgarian Folk Dancer

Mad Shoes

THIS BOOK IS A GAS—a carbonated novel whose bubbly mirth and flagrant lunacies mask a deeper aim. Will Sylvan Woods, it asks, ever manage to shed his callow cynicism and become a fully realized innocent? He is, to be sure, the least likely of heroes, and the road before him is murky and perilous. Demons await him at every turn. He will be tempted by money, fame, common sense, even by truth. Will he transcend them? You’ll have to read Mad Shoes to learn the answer.

Handfuls of Air

Handfuls of Air

Crusader Tours, stories, songs, and poems

Light fiction with a zany edge—here’s a book
that does the hardest thing a book can do:
make you smile.
Jim Gold offers an enlarged second edition
of a book that has made life funnier for his readers for years.

A Treasury of International Folk Dances
A Step-by-Step Guide
Choreographed by Jim Gold

New Leaf Journals
Adventures in the Creative Life

A New Leaf: Volume 1
A New Leaf: Volume 2
A New Leaf: Volume 3
A New Leaf: Volume 4
A New Leaf: Volume 5
A New Leaf: Selected  Readings