Writing Rooted in Community

“Unidentified Woman” | Unknown artist / Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture / Public Domain

Writing rarely ever comes from true solitude. That is the sentiment of author Giada Scodellaro, whose debut novel, Ruins, Child (New Directions, 2026) is a hybrid text on proximity, grief, growth, and kinship told through the interweaving stories of a community living in a dilapidated apartment complex. In a recent interview with Colette Estelle, Scodellaro explained, “All of the writing that I’ve done has been in relation to others, in the tradition of other people’s work, and in community with other people.” 

Ruins, Child, which won the 2024 Novel Prize, is structured into four parts, broken down into the media components of “the film,” “the text,” and “the sound.” The plot centers seven Black women whose identities are intrinsically linked to one another as well as their environment. With poetic dexterity, Scodellaro evokes sensations and perspectives that transcend the traditional form of the novel. We watch the lives of the women play out in 168 hours of described video footage taken through a greasy camera lens, read a text that is tattooed across a woman’s body, and listen to transcriptions of fractured audio recordings of their collective existence. Throughout the book, the voices of the women and the community join in chorus as they celebrate a ritual simply known as “the Holiday.” 

Filled with lush botanical imagery, surreal detail, and in conversation with artistic influences across music, film, and dance, Scodellaro’s novel creates a lively archive of our need for other people. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Colette Estelle: Where did you find this unique cinematic perspective, and why was it important that the story was told in that way?

Giada Scodellaro: I begin a lot of my writing with image or with sound. For this book, there were certain images and ideas around landscape, environment, and topography. I was doing all this research surrounding this and thinking about the large scope of that [environment] set against the granularity of this body, this older body, a pregnant body. “The film,” I think, allowed or offered an opportunity to create both distance and proximity. Both intimacy and discomfort. It is a form that I am really interested in. 

I love film. I love the playfulness that it allowed within the work, especially in terms of how I could duplicate the characters—the women—that are centered in the book. How we’re thinking about these 168 hours of footage, and how things can recur and be layered. I wanted to employ these things that I love about film and cinema—the immediacy of it, movement, choreography—while also trying to allow for stillness and hesitation. There are certain films that are very quiet, with frames that are still, with not much happening in them. Maybe there are things happening outside of the frame, a moment of reflection or something. And I was wondering, How do I employ that or enact that in language?

Even with the inclusion of the images, playing within the white space on the page, with spacing—all of these things that are happening in the book are ways for me to think about scope, the quiet, to seek pleasure, and play with things, and move outside of what we consider the novel to be, I think. I hope.

Estelle: Your unique visual style is so clear across your work. I read Some of Them Will Carry Me as well, and I wonder how your process differed from writing a short story collection versus writing in long form? 

Scodellaro: It was definitely a strange shift, because I do consider myself a short-form writer, and so it was sometimes challenging to move into the novel form. Then again, because I’m moving outside the confines of the traditional novel, that helped me in the writing of it. I think the most difficult thing was figuring out how to sustain something over time: how to sustain a life, how to sustain time and memory in a substantial way. 

With short stories, I could think about and hold the characters—all of them at once—in a way that is very familiar to me. But for the novel, trying to hold all these concepts, ideas, and histories, and keep everything together was really heavy thing. At the same time, it was also beautiful and interesting, I was curious about these lives and this environment, their continuity. I couldn’t help but to continue with it, it propelled everything forward.

Estelle: The world you created in Ruins, Child is so beautiful and surreal but also feels really personal and intimate. There is a lot of focus on landscape design and urban planning when describing these gardens growing over crumbling architecture. What makes you drawn to these niche details?

Scodellaro: I’m really interested in proximity, especially in public spaces. With urban planning and landscape design, there are so many considerations about how things flow, and what makes sense in terms of density, and all of these complex ideas about the sharing of public space. I think that’s the center of the obsession.

There’s also something really interesting about reading the work of an expert discussing the function of plants, or even the color of plants, how if you plant certain species the color will change over time, the seasonal changes, how they survive, or how to coordinate and choose them for a public space, how they will look set against each other. A species that will turn purple or turn yellow—how that will be set against a brutalist architecture. All of these things about time and season and climate and how it can be functional, inevitable, but how it can simply be about the pleasure of the aesthetic. 

I’m realizing as I’m having these conversations around the book that people are picking up on the crumbling and the collapse of place, but that’s not the way that I was thinking about it. My first thought was: Oh, this landscape is home. What does it also mean to stay and remain in a place, and to sustain an environment? And how to love it through change, even if it is deteriorating? How can repair be a part of a communal project and a communal caring—a gesture of care?

Estelle: Preservation was another recurring theme. The environment reads as if it’s fossilized. There’s no new construction, no renovations. It’s just the community who live there and glue it back together, who tend to the gardens, who cover their furniture in plastic and their floors in shag carpet. I wonder if you could talk about that preservation a bit more and what it means to you. 

Scodellaro: I think that was such an important part of conceptualizing and writing this—which also goes back to the form. Because there is a film, because there’s a section on sound and recordings, and because there’s a text that is written on the body of a character, I was thinking a lot about preservation and creating a record of their living. To build a sort of archive. To think about what things are inherited, what things are passed down. Thinking too about an active record, or evidence of this collective existence, and this history. What I really liked about thinking about these forms was their sense of authority: Here are the remnants, here are the remains, the residue, and this catalog, this documentation.

This record is something that was made by the community [of characters] itself. They’re preserving their own record. So it’s this idea of communal making and this opportunity to create a shared identity. Even if it’s a record of collapse or a record of return or whatever it is, it’s shared. 

Estelle: The idea of shared identity feels like the core of this book. It centers around a group of women who seem to move as one, yet when you zoom in, they’re all very different from one another. I’m interested in how you found all of these characters and why they are represented in this way?

Scodellaro: It began with the image of Vonetta! (with this purposeful exclamation point that follows her name), who is the matriarch, the central character. I saw a live performance of Linda Sharrock, who is an experimental vocalist and a jazz artist. Her voice was so loud, interesting, and strong. Some part of that came into Vonetta!. This idea of her being loose—but also gentle and endless, also wailing, and ancient. There are all these iterations of her and contradictions. I was really curious about her and interested in her as a tether and constant in this environment—her ability to hold all of these elements within her: the memory of place, the neighbors, the trees, and the film. She’s connected to the ground and the soil through her work.

I then thought about friendship and intimacy, especially between women. So building these six around her felt vital. It didn’t really feel like I had a choice about it. It felt like once I had her, Vonetta!, then I had to have her people—to make sure that she had people. I think too that the book is very much about grief and loss. So thinking about death and dying, anticipatory grief, and communal grief. It was necessary to build these women and to think about them individually but then also think about them collectively.

Estelle: I definitely felt this nuanced, collective grief. The watching of the film felt like a vigil in the way the community is keeping watch together. When someone gets tired, they leave the room and somebody else comes and fills in. This makes me think back to your epigraph, a line by Lucille Clifton, from her poem “dialysis”: “The woman who is over ninety / cries for her mother. if our dead / were here, they would save us.” It feels like such a haunted line to me. I’m curious about the idea of haunting, if that was with you in writing this.

Scodellaro: That epigraph is also about grief and loss, memory and time and lineage, which are all things that pervade the work. There are things that are haunting the characters and those same things are also sustaining the characters—foundational things: things that have already happened, that have come before and that will continue to happen. There’s a sense of protection. There’s a sense of understanding and knowledge through the lineage of this place, it is familial. There are also characters that literally haunt, physically haunt. All moments that I loved writing very much. 

I think it’s also very much in the tradition of, for example, Toni Morrison, that I’m always writing toward—will never reach, but I’m always writing toward and thinking about her work—real things, real hauntings, real flight/flying, not imagined things. Surrealism, to me, is a reality.

Estelle: Recurrence and perenniality permeate this book. I think “The Holiday” is a great example of this, the never-ending holiday being celebrated throughout the novel. Can you speak on what this represents for you?

Scodellaro: There’s so much about ritual that is interesting to me—about passing something down, even if it’s something that is not fully understood, simply because it’s been happening for so long. I think there’s something vital about it for the community. It’s a thread for them that is tethering them together. “The Holiday,” for them, is a celebration also, and the fact that it centers the women, it centers this film, it is generational.

It’s also about sustaining an oral tradition.

It’s about gossip. It’s about things that are overheard. It’s about sharing space, domestic space. It’s about the sharing of food. These traditions and recurrences help to keep the community connected and to continue thinking about what is surrounding them: for example, the violence of institutions and environmental racism. How can they stay unified or stay connected despite these circumstances?

Estelle: I’m curious how the act of listening contributes to your writing.

Scodellaro: Listening and sound are quite important [to me]. I think about ambient sound a lot—as mentioned, things that are overheard, heard in passing, music as a sonic landscape. I love thinking about sound and also the absence of sound; stillness, and quiet, and how to create that on the page; employing white space; and then again talking about the record of existence with the recordings and voices of the characters in part four, which encompasses all the sound of this community. These recordings encompassing what they are listening to, things they are reciting, books that they are reading, music that they’re listening to. So I think, again, to build this record of living, to layer—I’m interested in the things that can make up a life.