I don't believe I had ever heard the word, yoga, when the practice first came into my life in New York in the mid 1970's. If I had heard of Yoga, I would have understood it as a vague reference to another way of life--a way that was not at all clear to me at that time.

By the mid-seventies, New York had lost a good deal of the luster it had held for writers, like me, who had ventured there in the late sixties, when the New York Review of Books was getting off the ground and there were many parties, flocked with writers and editors, some of us perhaps thinking we were going to change the world.

Ten years later this renaissance no longer seemed a possibility; drugs and drink had taken their toll; and I began to hear talk that the creative center was moving West--as indeed it has. The all-night parties with heady literary talk that had been the core of my life in the sixties were no longer possible now that I was married with three children. My own work as a short story writer was pushed further and further to the margin by the demands of my children, and by the fact that publishing was already beginning the long decline so familiar to us, now, as it reaches its nadir. The beginning of this decline, for me, appeared when the women's magazines stopped publishing serious literary fiction; those magazines had been outlets for many of my early short stories. It is hard to believe, now, that Mademoiselle, Redbook and even the Ladies Home Journal published some of the best new writing of the time, including Dylan Thomas, Truman Capote, and Eudora Welty.

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