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December 21, 2022
Terena Elizabeth Bell's Playlist for Her Story Collection "Tell Me What You See"
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 Terena Bell's collection are set in the recent past and marvelously innovative in form.
The Atticus Review wrote of the book:
"Like a stampede of wild horses, it's powerful. it's uncontrolled. It doesn't care about your attempts to tame it. It breaks things it shouldn't. But in the end, when it has gone past you, and you are watching it and hearing the sound of it galloping away into the sunset, you think to yourself, I should start running too. Maybe it would make me feel better."
In her own words, here is Terena Elizabeth Bell's Book Notes music playlist for her story collection Tell Me What You See:
Since the stories in Tell Me What You See are experimental, when it comes to traditional elements like setting or formatting, they can be across the board. Some use images as dialogue, others as exposition, and some don’t have images at all. Most are set in New York City, but others take place in rural Kentucky, ancient Persia, and outer space. It’s an eclectic collection to say the least, but thematically, the pieces all flow together. That’s why my playlist is “The Long One” by The Beatles, also known as the Abbey Road Medley. At 16 minutes and 10 seconds, it’s not a song, rather a collection of song fragments laid together.
The Beatles may not be the first band you think of for a book about our country’s recent chaos, but “The Long One” is a medley that was never meant to be, just as we were never meant to have violent unrest in our Capitol. I played it a lot while writing and even more while trying to order the ten stories into a collection. Maybe it soaked in by osmosis, but if you listen long enough, you’ll realize the songs themselves don’t matter — it’s the way they come together. I wanted Tell Me What You See to flow like the way the Abbey Road Medley sounds: pieces of different songs becoming one.
"You Never Give Me Your Money"
Like much of The Beatles’ music, this song kicks the Abbey Road Medley off with multiple tempos. It starts in 4/4 with lyrics sung on a repeating high E. This steady time and repetition put the listener in almost a trance. But then the piece swaps to 2/4 for single measures at a time, the tempo is doubled for three bars, flats and sharps and triplets enter the picture. In other words, this song mixes calm with chaos.
I’d say this fits every piece in Tell Me What You See about corona, a time when we all had to find our own calming moments, but in particular, it reminds me of “23,195 New Yorkers and Counting,” a first-person account of a woman living by herself at the height of quarantine. She spends a lot of time in the tub (calm) while people die around her (chaos).
"Sun King"
This is Abbey Road’s multilingual offering, including lyrics in Spanish, English, Portuguese, and Italian. My “New York, March 2020” also has multiple languages: 20 of them, to be precise. It’s written in the shape of Manhattan, with each language placed over the neighborhood where US Census results show it’s most commonly spoken.
"Mean Mr. Mustard"
Remember how I said the songs in “The Long One” aren’t as important as they way they fit together? Well, on its own, “Mean Mr Mustard” is just a fun little song. But in between “Sun King” and “Her Majesty,” it makes the whole medley work. After “Sun King”’s slower pace and steady 4/4 time, the medley needs something higher-paced to keep the listener from losing focus, especially as “Her Majesty” is fairly slow and on a steady time signature as well. In terms of a short fiction collection, it isn’t only how a story reads, but how it fits with the others around it — not just for my book, but for anyone’s. “Mean Mr Mustard” also ends a lower third from the first note in “Her Majesty,” which helps listeners ‘feel’ the next song coming.
“Her Majesty”
The ninth story in Tell Me What You See is a modern retelling of the Biblical book of Esther, who was queen of Persia in 478 BCE. She was, as the song says, “a pretty nice girl,” but unlike its queen, Esther did “have a lot to say” — her words saved the Jewish people from genocide.
"Polythene Pam"
Written in cut time, this highly eccentric song is about an invented character based on two people The Beatles knew — a Liverpool scrubber and an early fan — plus a real-life threesome John Lennon had where all parties wore plastic bags. In other words, it’s a little crazy.
With footnotes, erasure, and erratic spacing, “The Fifth Fear” is the most experimental story in my collection. There’s no polythene sex, but there is a time portal made of quantum foam under New York’s Pier 90. So still crazy.
"She Came in Through the Bathroom Window"
If you think about the lyrics, this is a love story. This woman is dazzling and amazingly cooky, entering rooms through the window, sitting “by the banks of her own lagoon.” But when it comes to her future, she’s got on blinders, with Paul McCartney singing, “Didn’t anybody tell her? Didn’t anybody see?”
This describes the female character in my story “Privacy Station” to a T. She’s in a relationship she knows can’t last, but plunges head-first anyway. Even my male character’s response mirrors the song, with the lyrics “Sunday’s on the phone to Monday, Tuesday’s on the phone to me” showing the relationship’s craziness and “I know she thought I knew the answer, but what I knew, what I could not say” showing that he refuses to admit that he knows their relationship is hopeless too.
"Golden Slumbers"
“I go to prepare a place for you” is a first-person story about a woman who knows she’s going to die and doesn’t want her husband to grieve. She wants him to be happy, and creates a dream world for him where this can happen. Or, as McCartney puts it, “Sleep, pretty darling, do not cry, and I will sing a lullaby.”
"Carry That Weight"
The key lyric in this song is of course in its title, with the implication that this weight must be carried alone: “Boy, you’re gonna carry that weight, carry that weight a long time.”
The third story in Tell Me What You See, “#CoronaLife,” is a comparison of early quarantine lockdowns in New York City and rural Kentucky. The main character is originally from the commonwealth, where her family still lives. The entire story is told on her phone as tweets, texts, and emails fly between her and the other characters, both in New York and back home. As the situation in the city grows more critical with bodies stored in U-Haul trucks and helicopters filled with the dead hovering nonstop over her apartment, people back home try to help in exceedingly disconnected ways — like emailing her those fake “I can’t wear a mask” cards that circulated online.
As isolation grows in New York, the psychological weight of this plus her home state ignoring its own cases is one she will carry for a very long time.
"The End"
The final story in any short fiction collection must stand alone while summarizing the emotional tone of the entire book. The same goes for the last song in a medley. In “The End,” The Beatles do this with multiple tempos, notes that jump an octave or more, and a series of key changes connecting to other songs in “The Long One.”
Tell Me What You See’s final story — also its titular one — combines the experimental elements found in other parts of the collection, intermixing written words with drawings and photographs to create a dystopian reality. The drawings themselves create tension similar to the increasing energy in Ringo Starr’s drum solo and in McCartney, George Harrison, and Lennon’s guitar solos, all of which take turns, two bars at a time. The rotation was Harrison’s idea, which is rare in a medley largely written by McCartney and Lennon. Unlike most stories in my collection, “Tell Me What You See” doesn’t mention covid at all. It’s the piece about the Capitol — an event to end on indeed.
Terena Elizabeth Bell is a fiction writer. Tell Me What You See (Whiskey Tit) is her debut short story collection. Her writing has appeared in more than 100 publications, including The Atlantic, Playboy, MysteryTribune, and Santa Monica Review. A Sinking Fork, Kentucky native, she lives in New York.
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