The Unbound Book Festival is happening in Columbia this weekend and KBIA has been speaking with some of this year’s featured authors.
Alexandra Teague is an author, poet, and professor at the University of Idaho. In her new book, Spinning Tea Cups: A Mythical American Memoir , she addresses topics including mental illness, personal growth, and the complexity of families.
Teague recently sat down with KBIA’s Addison Zanger
Addison Zanger: I know that you usually do poetry, what was it like to sort of move to the essay, narrative style?
Alexandra Teague: Yes, it was a huge challenge. I read a lot of nonfiction, but I've never seriously written nonfiction before, and so, I moved to nonfiction.
Again, like I said, the project kind of took me by surprise. I wasn’t planning on doing that.
But when I decided that I was going to write this series of essays, it was because I realized that there were themes that I had been touching on in my poetry – about family mental health, about my nephew’s suicide, about various aspects of growing up and living in different parts of the country that I had touched on in my poetry, but never been able to fully develop.
And so, I really liked the idea of having the longer form of nonfiction to be able to slow down and talk about those.
Addison Zanger: One other thing I really love about your writing is that it's very descriptive, and I think that does come from your sort of poetic background. How else do you feel like writing poetry has influenced your narrative style?
Alexandra Teague: It's a great question, too. Definitely, I write very much by ear as a poet, and I am really listening always to the rhythms of my lines and sentences and how both meaning and sound are driving me forward.
And the creation of a certain kind of voice and momentum on the page, and all of that is true of my prose, as well.
So, when I came here to University of Idaho in 2011, and I started hearing colleagues read in the nonfiction track of our program and the students in there and everything, I was like – I had this epiphany at a reading at some point, which should have been fairly obvious, but nonfiction, more lyrical associative essays can move very, very much like poems do.
"It was really important to me to try to make the discussion of all of this more nuanced."Alexandra Teague
And so, when I realized that they could be kind of, you know, larger poems, that gave me a lot of freedom.
Addison Zanger: One thing I did love about the book—I think we all kind of grew up with mental health issues surrounding us— is that no one seems black or white. Everyone's a very complex character. How is it to sort of— it is your version of story, but step back and portray them not as good or bad, but as these complex people in your life?
Alexandra Teague: Thanks for saying that you feel like I did that because it was really important to me not to make things black and white.
In part because I grew up in a family, as I talked about here, where a lot of this got kind of pushed away because it was too hard to deal with because it felt like it was going to become kind of black and white in people's minds if we started talking about issues.
And so, it was really important to me to try to make the discussion of all of this more nuanced than that, and really, I feel like it's the form of nonfiction allowed me to do that, because I think at the heart of nonfiction is – well, at the heart of all writing, I really think, is asking good questions.
See more Unbound Conversations here and see more including the complete schedule of events on the Unbound Book Festival website.
