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September 7, 2022
Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes's Playlist for Her Story Collection "Are We Ever Our Own"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
The stories in Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes's collection Are We Ever Our Own are haunting, inventive, and always compelling.
Laura van den Berg wrote of the book:
"Are We Ever Our Own is a cabinet of wonders filled with uncanny intersections between the mythic and the daily, the spectral and the earthed…. Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes writes with marvelous insight into how the untold stories of the past can continue to haunt the present, and crafts structures that delight and devastate in equal measure—that feel as immense as time itself."
In her own words, here is Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes's Book Notes music playlist for her story collection Are We Ever Our Own:
I used to listen to music constantly when I wrote. The lyrics from songs would form the beginning of stories, their images and landscapes shaping my words. But in the last few years, I’ve found it very difficult to listen to music while writing, even music without lyrics. I don’t know if it’s because I have less time to write or because, between streaming services and the pandemic, my attention span has short-circuited. I had been thinking I’d lost touch with that connection to music, the special place listening created in my imagination, but in making this playlist, I realized how much music shaped this collection, and how the styles, lyrics, and rhythms of my favorite music is still very much woven into my writing.
“River,” Ibeyi
These twin sisters sing in Spanish, English, and Yoruba, mixing Afro-Cuban music traditions with contemporary images and narratives. I imagine this song, with its dream-like repetition, hypnotic rhythms, and prayer to the orisha Oshun, as the background to my story “Palm Chess,” about an experimental filmmaker’s attempt to uncover her family and personal history in rural Cuba.
“Tam Lin (Child 39),” Anaïs Mitchell and Jefferson Hammer
I’ve always listened to a lot of traditional Celtic music—shoutout to Fiona Ritchie’s long running radio program Thistle and Shamrock, which is the best soundtrack for long haul editing and grading sessions. I fell in love with the Child Ballads, a collection of English and Scottish folk tales, for their haunting narratives told in spare lyricism. They are like miniature fairy tales set to music: gruesome and beautiful. “Tam Lin” is one of my favorite Child Ballads and I love this modern, unitedstatesian version by Anaïs Mitchell and Jefferson Hammer. The final story in my book is named for this song and contains a version of the song’s narrative within it.
“Darkness on the edge of town,” Bruce Springsteen
I can remember the first time I intentionally listened to Springsteen. I was in college, home on break, and my dad put a CD of greatest hits into the car stereo, then walked me through what each song meant to him. I’ve been a fan ever since. Several of the characters in my stories are from the Midwest, and though Springsteen is from Jersey, his descriptions spoke to the places and people I saw around me in my home state of Wisconsin, in the same way they spoke to my dad as an immigrant growing up in Chicago. This song and album plays in my story “Loli & Magda” and I imagine it’s an important song to the narrator, that he sees his longing and anger reflected in it.
“Tamacún,” Rodrigo y Gabriela
I used to write to Rodrigo y Gabriela so often. Probably all of the stories in this collection were at some point in their editing or generating under the star of this song. When I find lyrics too distracting or when I’m searching for a certain intricacy and escalating rhythm in my prose, I put these acoustic guitarists on.
“Pa’lante,” Hurray for the Riff Raff
An anthem for immigrants, artists, exiles, workers, and survivors, this song is in three distinct parts: a lament, a clip from Pedro Petri’s protest poem “Puerto Rican Obituary,” and, finally, a rallying cry. The phrase “pa’lante” is important in Cuban American culture: a call to continue, to keep going. The song dwells in real sadness and frustration, while also being triumphant—that is the texture I’m often reaching for in my own work.
“Quimbara,” Celia Cruz
Credit where credit is due. I grew up on this queen: her music like air, water, and, of course, ¡azucár! The beats, the voice, the costumes, the wigs. Camp, joy, and a righteous pride of self and sense of dignity. I imagine I’ll keep turning to her, discovering new layers of her art and life for many years.
Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes is the author of Are We Ever Our Own, winner of the BOA Short Fiction Prize, and the novel The Sleeping World (Touchstone-Simon & Schuster, 2016). She has received fellowships from Hedgebrook, Willapa Bay Artists in Residency, Yaddo, the Millay Colony, Lighthouse Works, and the Blue Mountain Center. Her work has appeared in New England Review, The Common, One Story, Cosmonauts Avenue, Slice, Pank, NANO Fiction, Western Humanities Review, and elsewhere. She holds a BA from Brown University, an MFA from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and a Ph.D. from the University of Georgia. She grew up in a Cuban-Irish-American family in Wisconsin. She is an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland where she teaches creative writing and Latinx literature.
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