Featured Interview With Cynthia Yoder
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I grew up as the daughter of a Mennonite minister in Levittown, Pennsylvania, where my parents led a local church. We moved to Doylestown, Pennsylvania, when I was in high school. After some time in Manhattan, I married and moved to the Princeton, New Jersey, area with my husband and young son. Although we moved here to be closer to family, it is an ideal spot to be situated between the Delaware River and the Jersey Shore, both of which hold special memories from my childhood and teenage years.
Our household pets grew progressively larger as our son grew older. We started with fish and then a hermit crab. Around the time our son was in third grade, there were several hamsters. When Gabe was in in junior high, we rescued an elderly cat. When the cat died, my son was in high school, and we rescued a young Maltese-Poodle named Maggie, who is now part of our family. Gabe is now in college. Because of this up-scaling of animals by size, I would say that a pony is next, though we have no plans for it, nor does our yard have room for it. Maybe we’ll have to move.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
My earliest memory of books is going to the local library, where picture books displayed on a well-lit bottom shelf took my fancy. That I could take them home with me for a while was a blissful realization. I loved the smell of the books and the library itself–a memory that I would later revisit while working in the stacks at Columbia University Library. At age eight, I was typing poems of great silliness onto my father’s Smith Corona typewriter. I only know this because my grandparents actually saved one of those poems, dated it, and sent it to me when I was living in New York. I was surprised to know of this early writing–the rhymed poem had something to do with our cat’s vomit, and our dog eating said vomit. I was even more astounded that my grandparents had been so thoughtful as to keep this poem for some fifteen years. I was one of seventeen grandchildren and great-grandchildren, so they had not just a few of us to keep track of. My early scratchings led to story-poems, and then stories, which I never stopped writing.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
I love to get lost in the alternative universes of literary fiction. Some favorites that I devoured as a teen and in college: Tolstoy (esp. Anna Karenina); John Steinbeck (esp. Travels with Charley); J.R.R. Tolkien, Zora Neale Hurston. Along the way, some favorites have included: Toni Morrison, Kurt Vonnegut, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Tom Robbins. Inspiring my current writing: Sue Monk Kidd, Paul Coelho, Kent Haruf (Plainsong), Liane Moriarty, and these memoirists: Rhoda Janzen, Cheryl Strayed, Elizabeth Gilbert. So many more that I love and have been inspired by. This is a thumbnail at least.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
This book started as a revision to my memoir, Crazy Quilt: Pieces of a Mennonite Life, but it began to take on a life of its own. So I went with it and wrote the novel, Mennonite on the Edge: An Unlikely Romance.
Though a country-girl at heart, MaryJo wants to ditch her identity as a Mennonite in marrying Adam and living a life of adventure in Manhattan. But news from home kicks up memories she’d tried to bury. While she begins to question her choices, Adam lands a high-profile job, making a move seem impossible. MaryJo must make peace with her past and her current situation so that she can live the life of her dreams with Adam. But can she reconcile her craving for serenity in the City that Never Sleeps?
Set in both New York City and the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch Country, the book reveals a young woman’s struggles to define life on her own terms. The more she attempts to redefine herself apart from her past, the more the past seems to pull her in.
This novel took me a little under a year to write. I’m still surprised by that. My memoir took much longer. But the characters do take on a life of their own. It was easier to write their fictional stories than it was for me to write about my own life.
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