Check out info to the left about my travels (Blog), my career as a journalist and nonfiction chronicler (Nonfiction) and published excerpts from my collection of short stories in progress (Fiction).

Also just over there, you'll find the latest on my new book, First There Is a Mountain, a memoir about my encounter with yoga’s modern history, its ancient mythology and its complicated maverick BKS Iyengar, published by Little, Brown and Co this January. This has been lauded by Poets & Writers magazine as a "luminous account," by the great Aimee Bender ("Kadetsky's book seamlessly combines the emotions of a meaningful personal journey with a journalist's rigor and scope-I found it both inspiring and educational. Makes you want to get up on your feet and have a body.") and in Yoga Journal ("A highly readable and unusually informed look into a milieu that many regard romantically but few know firsthand--and even fewer have described so engagingly.").

All this and more, just touch those links.

photo: Nina Subin
FTaM jacket design: Josh Gosfield

Comments

[Alex Hansen]

I just got back from the National Iyengar Yoga Convention in Saint Paul, MN. I read, First There Is a Mountain, each night I was there. I had classes with many of the people mentioned. I'm trying to decide if this set up some sort of conflict. If it did it is a conflict that is seeming to help me be centered: aiding an ecummenical perspective; or really, more accurately, it offered a secular guiding light. I appreciate that someone has bought a western 'inquisition' to the precepts of yoga. I have said to myself, and others, that Yoga is not `a la' carte. But this did rely on the somewhat blind faith assumption that it is not abitrary and especially not capricious in its foundation. The first and second padas of the Yoga Sutras as interpreted and commented on By B.K.S. Iyengar are certainly not either the former or the later. The Yoga Sutras are the foundation of Yoga, to keep this in mind when practicing the "physical" yoga is quintessential. I see the asanas as vehicles for exploring deeper issues, like those brought up in the Sutras. This concept seems to me to be exquisitely demonstrated by, First There Was a Mountain, from the first to the last page. Whether one is tragically flawed seems irrelevant to me. I guess being an American from a divorced family I have never held anyone up to a guru/hero status. I think this is why I had a hard time understanding the perspective of the book at times. I see the teacher or the guru or the hero situationally. For the time of the class, or as related to a specific subject, one is the teacher and the other is the pupil. But in other situations that heirarchy dissolves, is this tragically flawed?

[Alex Hansen]

Please Note that my previous comment is in response to the book, as well as an interveiw with Elizabeth Kadetski posted at:

www.twbookmark.com/authors/16/2887/

My comment will make more sense after reading the interveiw.

Thanks.

[sudharak]

hi do u rememer me.sudharak from mumbai

[illeterate]

update? or downdate.

[jamal kadri]

elizabeth:

i met you on the bus to Kripalu -- winter solstice 2007. i just finished your book, and really enjoyed it. i brought a lot of myself into my reading of it -- my search for identity as the progeny of a culturally mixed marriage, the notion of looking to india for answers that are ultimately found within...

i hope you will let me know if your travels are going to take you back to India in the forseeable future.

jamal

[Jason Rizos]

Hello, Elizabeth, I recorded your reading at AWP for Best New American Voices and I'd like to put it up on Lit-Cast, a link here, to your book, Best New, etc., etc. Please get a hold of me by email and let me know if that is cool! Thanks - Jason

[dissertation]

Blogs are so interactive where we get lots of informative on any topics nice job keep it up !!

[John Casey]

DEar Elilzabeth,
Please get in t ouch with your old prof John Casey.