Domenica Ruta's 5 Favorite Things
Including Fascia Lab, tarot cards, and poems.
Each month, I ask an author I love to share five recommendations they have for other writers, whatever is the wind beneath their wings when they sit down to write. This month I reached out to my friend Domenica Ruta, whose forthcoming novel, All The Mothers, will be published alongside my memoir on May 6 (next Tuesday—still time to preorder it!).
Domenica is the NYTs bestselling author of the memoir With or Without You and the novel Last Day, a 2019 NYT Notable book of the year, as well as co-editor of the anthology We Got This: Solo Mom Stories of Grit, Heart and Humor. She's published short fiction and essays in the Iowa Review, the Boston Review, the Indiana Review, Epoch, Ninth Letter, The Cut, and elsewhere. She publishes personal essays with zero regularity and lots of love for free on her Substack:
.So without further ado I’m handing the metaphorical microphone over to Domenica!
The Fascia Lab: Whoever says, “write everyday” is not a woman and has never paid attention to women for more than five seconds at a time. I can’t write “everyday” when I am in pain, whether it is emotional or physical, and we live in a world with an abundance of pain. So let’s start with a sustainable practice of relief for the body. That should always be the first step of anything, whether overtly creative, like writing an essay, or sneakily creative, like making dinner, making a life.
At The Fascia Lab, Jessa Zinn, a single mom, teaches a movement method that is not even one percent about weight loss or “toning” or diet culture. I took a class geared for tight necks. In the beginning we took inventory of how much mobility we had in our necks. Mine moved a few degrees in both directions then slammed into a wall of pain that I had for years, decades, my whole life probably, and that I accepted as normal. After all of Jessa’s strange and magical exercises, I turned my head like an owl. It was nothing less than pure bodily liberation. After decades of deep study and work as a practitioner in basically every kind of body work, Jessa founded the lab to empower women in middle life. Through in-person (NYC) and online classes, she will teach you how to assess, release, and rewire movement patterns so you can age with strength, clarity, and agency. If the body keeps the score, mine is winning a championship she never wanted to compete in. Jessa is here to remind us we can walk off that battlefield and into a new destiny.
The New Savant: Sometimes I need to play a little before I write. I like to do witchy things with herbs and ice and fire and rocks. I’m sure there is a lot of neurobiology behind this, but for whatever reason, when I stop to light a candle, to watch the flame and smoke and smell the fragrance of it, I feel amazing and present in the simplest and most powerful way. I use all kinds of candles but my favorite scented ones are from The New Savant. They understand how each scent evokes a story and how layering scents creates worlds. This is such a good practice when you are doing the work of world-building in your writing. They have scents called Library in the Forest and Architect’s Daughter whose names alone make me want to start writing something moody and weird. Major plus that it is a queer-women-owned and operated company.
Rider-Waite-Colman-Smith Tarot deck and Michelle Tea’s book Modern Tarot: We’re not done playing! After I light my candle and do my little spells, I like to pull a Tarot card from trusty Rider-Waite-Colman-Smith deck. It’s not the most progressive deck (very gender-and-heteronormative, very white), nor is it the most beautiful (there are some gorgeous decks out there) but it’s the one I learned to read cards on in high school and I just love the old school collection of archetypes and symbols.
Sometimes I have a specific question about my life or the project I’m working on, and sometimes I’m just looking for vibes. It’s important to be in the right head space – I can’t be too fussy or demanding or so full of fear I’m turning all my power over to a deck of cards. If you’re in a really frightened or stressed out place it is a guarantee your worst fears of the future will be reflected in the cards. Just trust me on this.
In All the Mothers, there is a moment when the protagonist, Sandy, is at a low point in her life and doesn’t know what to do. As the author, I also didn’t know what to do for her, as I had sort of written myself into a corner. So I pulled a card, not to tell me what the next plot point should be, but to show me what energy was needed. I pulled the Nine of Pentacles, featuring a very fancy lady in her gorgeous vineyard, a falcon perched on her hand. This card represents material abundance and a feeling of control, the opposite of what Sandy is going through, and spoiler alert, where she is headed. But that doesn’t really matter when you use the Tarot as form of intuitive grown-up play time. So based on this card, I decided Sandy needed to go outside and see a bird. The moment doesn’t change her life, but it shifts the energy around her and her family as they navigate a series of struggles. And when it was time to create a cover for the book, I told the designer Joel Burden to use the Three of Cups as inspiration, which he did with all the warmth and beauty that card contains.
If you’re new to Tarot or want to update your practice with some feminist, genderqueer insights on the old tropes, I cannot recommend Michelle Tea’s book Modern Tarot enough.
Poetry, in general, but specifically The Natural Order of Things by Donika Kelley:
The reason I write fiction and non-fiction is purely because I failed at poetry. It is my first love, the first thing I reached for when I was young and trying to express myself on the page. Poetry has the immediacy of music and visual arts, and for me, it is very very hard to pull off. I write a couple poems a year that I will never show anyone ever because they are objectively bad. This is not self-deprecating – I genuinely suck at writing poetry. Like, it’s hopeless. Which is so freeing! Imagine letting yourself be really bad at something, accepting that you will never be good at, that the improvement curve is not happening for you, and then doing it anyway. This is so good for your soul. And your work in other genres will better for it, not because you’ve learned a new craft tool, but because you’ve won a battle against your own fear.
Someone who is devastatingly good at poetry is Donika Kelley. I’ve been a super fan since I met her in the early aughts. I have every book she’s published plus some limited edition chapbooks (yes, I’m bragging.) Bestiary is magical and beautiful and like nothing I’ve read before. The Renunciations is absolutely gutting, like lay on the floor and ache level emotion, but the last poem scoops you up and holds you in ray of hope. Her newest collection comes out in October. I’ve already pre-ordered and you should, too!
Absolutely Fabulous: When writing is going badly and not even my candles and Tarot and poetry are inspiring me, it’s time to take a day or two off and shake up the stuck energy with some laughter. I watch a lot of stand-up comedy, almost exclusively female comics, and subscribe to a lot of (female and nonbinary) comedians’ podcasts, but when things are bad and I need the strong stuff, I go right to the source. For me, that is the 90s era Brit com Absolutely Fabulous written by and starring the inimitable Jennifer Saunders.
For those who don’t know, Ab Fab is about Edwina Monsoon, an alcoholic, drug addict single mom, her codependent and also alcoholic best friend, Patsy Stone, and Edwina’s long-suffering, uptight, straight-laced teenage daughter, Saffron. I discovered the show in middle school when Comedy Central would play marathons of it on Super Bowl Sunday as a sort of unofficial revolt for the girls, gays, and theys. Never before had I seen a depiction of my life with such clarity and humor. Like Eddie and Patsy, my own drug-addict single mom was sometimes wickedly funny, sometimes wickedly cruel. The catharsis I experienced watching this show at a young age, before I was old enough to
see a therapist or even think about writing a memoir, remains a life-saving force. I could write a whole 10,000 panegyric on this show if it were only trendy enough to pitch (I’m looking at you, The New Yorker.) Some of the jokes have not aged well, and some are prophetic and timeless. You have to ignore the canned laughter (it’s a 90s sitcom after all) but it is so worthwhile for your next binge.
Yesssss to all of these! Especially using tarot for guidance 🤭