Snapshots presents Cheryl J. Fish on her new book 'Off the Yoga Mat'
"'Off the Yoga Mat' explores jealousy, bends of the body, and the courage to confront traumatic memory."
Could you tell us about your new book Off the Yoga Mat?
With age 40 looming, Nate, Nora, and Lulu find their lives unraveling, their aspirations dashed. Nate, dead broke, in his eighth year of graduate school delves into yoga. Nate's ex-girlfriend Nora finagles an assignment to work for Nokia in Finland, where she tries on men like miniskirts and embraces sisu, the Finnish concept of perseverance, in pursuit of motherhood. And yogi Lulu, Nate’s talented teacher, yearns to get to the bottom of her nightmares of childhood abuse as she travels to her hometown, New Orleans, to care for her ailing mother. Off the Yoga Mat explores jealousy, bends of the body, and the courage to confront traumatic memory.
How have your experiences as a Fulbrighter influenced the novel?
My Fulbright experience heavily influenced Nora’s plot. I wanted a Finnish story arc. The novel begins in New York City’s East Village where the three main characters live, work, and play, but Nora escapes bad office politics and a stagnant relationship to work in marketing at Nokia for a few months, the difference being she wants a child as she and the other protagonists are about to turn 40, whereas I had a seven-year-old son with me during the Fulbright. Like Nora, I had a rich social life in Tampere with friends from the university and beyond who took me to saunas, karaoke bars, flea markets, museums, ski trails, frozen lakes, and to their homes. Families from the school my son attended enriched our experience too, and he learned to speak some Finnish and play ice hockey. Nora’s closest friend in Finland, Bethany, is based on someone I met during my Fulbright who introduced me to a whole network of international friends; not only did she inspire a character, but I have performed my poems in a Tampere bar with her band. My education regarding Finland’s history during and between the World Wars (that Americans don’t learn about), the concept of sisu, and the lives and activism of the indigenous Sami people made a deep impression on me that I incorporated into the novel. I also explored the romantic attraction of an outsider to a local person, the exhilaration of trying new foods, drink, music, dance, sports and communication styles that take you outside your comfort zone and make you yearn to return and dig deeper.
Who are your greatest creative inspirations?
My literary inspirations are many! Zadie Smith is a writer with the ability to blend humor, satire, pathos, and develop characters through their unique voices and the places where they reside and come from. Smith’s fiction and non-fiction engages with many of the arts, and I enjoy her take on books and popular culture, and her astute analysis and wit regarding contemporary issues. When I was writing the first draft of Off the Yoga Mat, Graham Greene’s prose and the tone of heartbreak in his novel The End of the Affair helped me figure the character of jealous Nate. My archival research and writing on nineteenth century African-American and Jamaican women who wrote travel narratives (Nancy Prince and Mary Seacole), the focus of two of my scholarly books, influenced some of Lulu’s backstory and the accomplishments and struggles of her female ancestors in New Orleans.
Music has been a major influence for me in writing Off the Yoga Mat. On the blog Largehearted Boy, I detailed the way certain songs inspired or were threaded through the experience of the characters. For example, “Säkkijärven polkka,” by Eemelia & Esa Pakarinen is a song that captures Finnish flamboyance, humor, and tradition beneath an introverted exterior. Nightwish, a symphonic metal band, had the powerful Tarja Turenen as lead vocalist during my Fulbright in Finland, but she soon departed the band. “Nemo,” a big international hit with a lilting piano refrain, is about songwriter Tuomas Holopainen’s sense of feeling like a “nobody” (the Latin meaning of nemo). Nora, at the time of farewell (and 40th birthday) party, feels despondent about leaving Finland. She’s in limbo about returning to her marketing job in New York and her yearning to have a child.
About Cheryl
Cheryl J. Fish’s debut novel Off the Yoga Mat, the story of three characters coming-of-middle age, was published by Livingston Press/UWA in Oct. 2022. She is the author of The Sauna is Full of Maids, poems and photographs celebrating Finnish sauna culture, the natural world, and friendships, and Crater & Tower, poems reflecting on trauma and ecology after the Mount St. Helens Volcanic eruption and the terrorist attack of 9/11. Fish has been a Fulbright professor in Finland and is a co-editor with Farah Griffin of A Stranger in the Village: Two Centuries of African-American Travel Literature. Her published essays on environmental justice through art, film and media include “Extractivism’ in Sápmi.: Elegiac Ecojustice in Liselotte Wajstedt’s Film Kiruna Space Road and Marja Helander’s Silence Photographs,” in the collection Nordic Narratives of Nature and the Environment (Lexington Books, 2018) and on Sami film in Critical Norths: Space, Nature, Theory (University of Alaska Press). She was a guest blogger for Environmental History with her piece “Indigenous Art Collectives: Environmental/Social Justice Protests Through Artvism and Direct-Action Protest.” She is a creative writing editor of the journal Ecocene: Cappadocia Journal of Environmental Humanities. Fish is professor of English at BMCC/City University of New York and docent lecturer at University of Helsinki. Her website is cheryljfish.com and she is @cheryljoyfish on Twitter and Instagram.
Read an excerpt from Off the Yoga Mat \ Read a review of Off the Yoga Mat