Ru Freeman Recommends...

"I need to feel invested in life to write. So I dance to music that compels life into my body: any from the old hippie Broadway musicals—Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar, Hair—any Latin ballroom or belly dance, any Jay-Z, Madonna, Run-DMC, George Michael, Black Eyed Peas and I'm at ‘Boom Boom Pow' with life.

"Being at uninhibited physical ease with the universe creates space in me for the rich interiorities people cart around as they move, in their own ways, in the variously hospitable worlds of our making. If the story is stuck, I let it be and begin something else; the given day is too precious to squander on battling the occasionally intransigent fictions of my mind. Eventually, it becomes possible to return. The trail separation gives us both new perspectives; if the differences are irreconcilable, there's always divorce. Not everything I write must be seen and read, nor every story told."
—Ru Freeman, A Disobedient Girl (Atria Books, 2009)