Literary Yoga

Literary Yoga is a craft book of one hundred writing exercises. The premise is in the title: what the gentle stretching on the yoga mat does for muscles and joints, these deliberately painful tasks do for the writing talents inside the writer. The exercises are meant to be returned to again, and again, and again.

Tarnawsky framed his approach to writing, in a 2022 interview with The Collidescope, as "akin to proving a theorem, the goal is to do it, and do it as elegantly as possible." The prompts share that temperament: formal, exacting, set up to make the writer work against a constraint and see what the constraint does.

Before he was a novelist and poet, Tarnawsky spent thirty-six years at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center on machine translation. The exercises are the bench version of that cast of mind.