PtoP Bell Ep 26 edit 1
===

Carrie: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Prompt a Page podcast, a partnership between the Jessamine County Public Library and the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning. I'm your host, librarian and poet, Carrie Green. Each episode, we interview a published writer who shares their favorite writing prompt. Our guest today is Terena Elizabeth Bell.

Terena is a fiction writer. Her debut short story collection, Tell Me What You See, published in December of 2022. Her work has appeared in more than 100 publications, including The Atlantic, Playboy, Salamander, and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Welcome, Terena, and thanks for joining us. 

Terena: Hi, Carrie. Thanks for having me on.

Carrie: So, your short story collection, Tell Me What You See, contains experimental fiction about current events, including the early days of the 2020 pandemic, and the coronavirus quarantines. So obviously the events [00:01:00] of the last three years have been pretty unconventional. 

Terena: That's one way to put it. 

Carrie: I would say.

Can you talk a little bit about what led you to explore these more experimental forms? 

Terena: It's funny because I've always been more of a Southern Gothic writer. I would have said, it's funny. I would get compared to Flannery O'Connor a lot, and then in recent years, Carson McCullers, who I hadn't read until a lot of people compared me to her, and then I read her, and I was like, I kind of get it, like that, that makes sense.

So I've never written experimental before, but one of the stories in the collection is about the January 6th attack on the U. S. Capitol, and I have a friend who is a member of Congress. And I thought I saw her in the room where, like when they were actually voting and she wasn't in there. Turns out she was in her office, like when they tried to storm the chamber and break in and they had to put the bar thing across the doors to keep them from getting in.

And like, you could see their guns poking out. But I thought that I saw her cowering under her desk. And turns out that [00:02:00] we're just in the fortunate position of, of finally having multiple, you know, young women with dark hair who would be in the chamber doing official business, you know, so it's not just like one,

you know, brunette in there or whatever, nothing against any blondes, if they want to run for Congress, go for it. But it really, really, really unnerved me. And when I was talking with her in the days that followed, I was like, you know, what do you need me to do to help put this country back together?

You know, do you, do you need me to come, you know, I'm like, do I need to clean toilets? You know, like, do I need to come and cook for you and clean your apartment while you're there doing the important stuff? You know, how can I help? And she said, you can write. But the thing about it is that wasn't a normal day, so I couldn't write about it normally, you know, like, like, what would Flannery O'Connor do with January 6th, you know, you know, like, like, like good men are definitely hard to find, you know,

Carrie: oh, yeah, 

Terena: right.

How does that how does that wind up working out? And. And I thought it's not a Freytag Pyramid situation, and I knew it [00:03:00] had to be written about abnormally because it was an abnormal event. So I started playing around with experimental forms then, and I thought, you know, I can't just take January the 6th on

never having done this before. I've got to practice, you know, and so I did a lot of other experimental forms. COVID was very, very, very present on everyone's mind. And so I started, you know, playing around with that. Like I think the first story I actually wrote was a choose your own adventure where no matter what decision you made, you died.

Right. That, that wound up not publishing. I, I, I, to my credit, I didn't try to send it out. I realized it was a little flippant. And a little soon, but that's how I kind of came into writing experimental. So, yeah, 

Carrie: was it challenging to revisit those events or do you think those forms kind of helped you?

see it in a different way. 

Terena: Yeah, it depended on the story. Like there's 1 in there that's written as a list and that actually came out of a prompt [00:04:00] class. And it was not it was not really emotionally hard because I was just able to kind of tackle the writing, but there was another 1 in there called #CoronaLife that actually,

we were kind of chatting about a little bit in preparation for the podcast today that was published by McNeese Review online and it's completely told on the characters, the main character's phone. And so you're actually seeing images and it's a character who's from Kentucky but lives in New York City.

And one side of the story are texts and tweets and that kind of thing from people in New York. The other side is Kentucky. And then the character's narrative is stuck in the middle. That was very, very emotionally hard for me to write because I was living in New York in March, 2020.

And so I was having to look at, you know, images of dead bodies being put in refrigerator trucks, because that's what a character would see at that time. And for those of us who were living in New York at that time, like we weren't. [00:05:00] Depending on where you lived, you were told not to open your windows. We did not go outside for very long periods of time.

And by that, like, like I know people that they did not even leave their apartment, like not even to take the trash to the chute down the hall. We were dying that rapidly and we had no idea why. And so whenever I started going through all of those images again, my mind kind of flipped to that, and my friends were like, you know, Terena hasn't, has anybody talked to her for a while?

You know, and it's like, oh, she's accidentally quarantined herself because she's writing about quarantine. Maybe we should call. 

Carrie: Well, it's good you had people looking out for you. Do you have any advice for writers who want to write about current events or who do that on a regular basis? 

Terena: Go on and do it and you have to be and I'm not by any means calling myself brave, but you do have to be brave to do it because we are in such a volatile time [00:06:00] that there's a lot of, for better or for worse, whichever side it comes from.

We do live in a cancel culture. And there are a lot of writers that they would love to write about what's going on in the world, but they don't want to ruin their careers. They don't want to ruin their good names. I had a nonfiction essay that I wrote once that was published about my hometown where I grew up in Christian County.

And I had people yelling at my mama in the grocery store. My parents had to change churches. You know, because people just disagreed with what they said. And my thing is, if you want to write about that stuff, you have to do it. And you can't, I realized I just, you know, mentioned fallback, but you can't worry about the fallback on it.

You have to just write from your heart. And that's why my collection is called, Tell Me What You See, because I wrote what I saw. You know, living up here during that time and, you know, there are parts where it's like, you know, here's what's going on in Kentucky in the book. Well, that's what I saw from my family, you know, texting me and things [00:07:00] like that.

And I can't change what I saw. You know, and I try to not say, you know, this was right. This was wrong. These people behaved well, these people behaved poorly, but no one who's read it hasn't walked away thinking, you know, that I did think one way or the other, you know, but I just wrote down what I saw and

what I saw from 2020 to 2022 was inherently political. You know, that's just the way that our country became from what I saw. And so you have to write with your voice, what you saw, and you can't worry about whether, you know, whether it's going to get published, whether if you publish it, anything else is going to get published, you know, whether your mother is going to like it.

And really that's the same advice that I would give to someone who's writing non political stuff, Carrie, because what happens when you are more worried about those things than the writing or the story itself is you get [00:08:00] locked in your head. And when you get locked in your head, you're stuck in edit mode.

And when you're stuck in edit mode, you can't really generate or produce new writing because every sentence, well, what are people going to think about this? Well, what are people going to think about that? You have to turn all of that off and just write. 

Carrie: Yeah, that's great advice. So you mentioned a prompt, briefly, do you, do you use prompts in your own writing?

Terena: I, I 

do, and I use them, they're great for getting out of your head and getting out of that edit mode, and they're wonderful for generating new work. It's funny, like, like, If you go back and you listen to other episodes of, Prompt to Page, it's funny because you get some writers that, that they use them, but it doesn't come back into any work that, like, they wind up publishing.

It just kind of gets them out of writer's block. But I'm very much one of those writers where there are, I think, maybe four stories in the collection, and the collection has ten, that they did start from prompts. And to me, it all comes down to the [00:09:00] prompt. Like, I'm one of those. Like I taught prompt at New York Society Library, all during the pandemic.

And then I went to Centre College and when I was at center, I taught at, and they changed the name of it. I think it's like Sunshine Children's Services or something now, but it was Woodlawn Children's Church Home when I went to the Centre, but it's for, sexually and or physically abused children. And so I led a prompt class with them as part of my work study at Centre, you know, and that kind of thing.

And what I've found works best for me and maybe it's because, you know, I can get locked in my head and I don't really like people telling me what to do. And, a lot of times prompts can be really long and they sort of tell you what to do in their life. Well, you know, let's imagine a girl and the girl is eight years old and her name is Alice and then a rabbit comes up and then the rabbit says that they are late.

Now, write that story. You know, and it's like, you know, you've already told me so much that I'm like, I can't, I don't know, or people that they'll give the prompt and then they won't shut up. They'll be like, you [00:10:00] know, like the prompt is and then, you know, while you're writing, just let your mind go free and just think and don't worry about all.

And it's like, I'm trying to write you gave me the prompt. I'm trying to write. I'm really big on just giving me a single word. And then you shut up. 

Carrie: Okay, 

Terena: that doesn't mean that the other doesn't work. Like one of the stories I Go to Prepare a Place for You in the book, the teacher's name actually was John Manny and he was with New York Writers Coalition and he read a poem and then he had us look at critical elements from that poem and, you know, like, like, look at volta's and that kind of thing.

And then he was like, okay, I want you to write a list about paradise that has a volta. And normally that's the kind of thing that is so precise. Just like, seriously, John? Seriously? Like, now I'm going to be wondering, like, while I write this whole thing, well, where's the volta? You know, because it's like, you're just trying to do what the teacher tells you.

But that wound up working dazzlingly well for me. You know? 

Carrie: Oh, interesting. 

Terena: If I'm making a ten [00:11:00] point list, like... I don't know if I remember everything from my Centre English classes. Like when I get to points four through six is where I need to stick it. You know, like somebody who didn't, you know, have Roberta White at Centre College or, you know, things like that, like they might not know what a volta is.

And I just realized now I've probably accidentally insulted someone without meaning to. Volta is the change. 

Carrie: Okay. 

Terena: I apologize. 

Carrie: I didn't want to admit that I didn't know what the volta was. So I'm glad you 

Terena: Good call.

Carrie: I'm glad you I'm glad you defined it for us. 

Terena: Yeah, now I feel really, really stuck on that. I'm really stuck on that.

Carrie: No, no, no. No, not at all. Yeah. 

Terena: I can be overly esoteric. I love words. 

Carrie: So what's the prompt that you wanted to give us today? Your favorite writing prompt. 

Terena: Well, I said that my favorite writing prompts are just words where somebody says it and then they just shut up and let go. And the reason, the reason why for me is just more because if you think about [00:12:00] words, I mean, we dwell in words.

It's what we do. So if you're given the right word, it can trigger something. Now, like if I just said typewriter and go, you might be sitting there like typewriter, you know, like, like anybody under 40 is like, what is that? 

But like the right word, it can really sometimes trigger an emotion.

It can sometimes trigger like, especially word with multiple meanings. So I'm not giving you a random word out of my pocket. I actually thought about this. All right. So the word for today is. Blue.

All right. Long pause. People at home, you are still turned on. You are still listening to Jessamine County Public Library.

Carrie: Well, that is a very resonant word for a lot of people. So, so I think that would be, Hopefully, that'll get some people thinking and out of their boxes. 

Terena: And when you do the single word ones, it's beautiful. Like, I used that in a class [00:13:00] once, and you get somebody writing about blue like sadness. You get somebody writing about blue the color.

You get, somebody wrote a song, I'm sorry, wrote a short story about a hound dog named Blue. You know, like, like there are a lot of different ways, especially in the South, you know, that you can go with that. So, you know, I realized that I just gave you a word and then I gave you ideas to go with it.

And some people need that, like, if you're really stuck. But, the one thing that like the one word and go kind of prompts do is that they just teach you that you can write about anything at any time if you just turn everything else off and try, you know, so yes, you can take that word blue and run with it or just take the dictionary or heck the Bible's got a lot of really fun words in it, you know, like take the closest book to you or whatever and just open it up in the first word you see and then just go with it.

You know, like, where does that word association take you? And if it's a lame one and you don't like it, you don't have to write about that. Just turn the page and pick [00:14:00] another one. 

Carrie: I don't know, about you, but one thing I like to do also is keep a little notebook with words that, that I am drawn to, and so you kind of build yourself a little word bank and can kind of go to that whenever you need, whenever you need one.

Terena: If somebody really does well with like the prescriptive prompts, Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin is a really great book. Like, one of the, actually the very first short story in my collection came from one of her prompts that had to do with the way that we think about punctuation, if that makes any sense at all.

But she's got some very actually grow your craft through the prompt stuff in that book that's really good. 

Carrie: Uh huh. Great. Do you have any final writing tips that you'd like to give our listeners? 

Terena: Just keep going. It's a lonely profession and, you know, sometimes people don't like your work. Sometimes they do.

Sometimes you don't even show it to them, but you have to find it [00:15:00] within yourself to keep going. 

Carrie: Uh huh. Well, thank you so much, Terena, and we're glad that you are keeping going and thanks for joining us today. 

Terena: Thank you for having me.

Carrie: Thank you for listening to Prompt to Page. To learn more about the Jessamine County Public Library, visit Jesspublib.org. Find the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning at carnegiecenterlex. org. Our music is by Archipelago, an all instrumental musical collaboration between three Lexington based university professors.

Find out more about Archipelago, Songs from Quarantine Volumes 1 and 2 at the links on our podcast website.