EP 977B - Yoga for the Inflexible Male: A How-To Guide

Guest Bio: Roy Parvin, "Yoga Matt"

Yoga Matt is the nom de namaste of Roy Parvin and a nod to the everyman of yoga. Parvin is the award-winning fiction author of In the Snow Forest (WW Norton), and a recipient of a National Endowments for the Arts Grant in Literature. Roy is also an elite cyclist; his devotion to yoga began as therapy for a bout of sleeplessness. The yoga proved to be so therapeutic for his insomnia that he became an evangelist of the ancient practice.

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Roy Parvin is an award-winning author of literary fiction whose work has won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts in Literature. His work has been included in the Best American Short Story series. A feature-length motion picture, Voyez Comme Ils Dansent, based on Roy’s novella, “Menno’s Granddaughter,” directed by French auteur, Claude Miller, won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2011 Rome International Film Festival.More recently, Parvin has written Yoga for the Inflexible Male, a funny how-to guide under the nom de namaste of Yoga Matt. Parvin/Yoga Matt discovered the ancient practice during a disastrous misdiagnosis that left him without REM sleep for 339 straight days. Where medicine failed, yoga prevailed—at least in dealing with the fallout of not sleeping, anxiety and panic attacks—until Parvin found a decent doctor who could properly address the problem.Yoga for the Inflexible Male is the first of two books to emerge from this medical crisis. The second is a medical memoir, My Year of Sleeping Dangerously, that will make the rounds of publishers in early 2020, excerpts of which have been published in Psychology Today, where Parvin is a columnist about sleep issues.When not doing yoga, writing or sleeping, Parvin teaches creative writing workshops at the graduate MFA level and at writing conferences.