In these quirky and richly told tales, Alexandra Teague brings readers along for the wild ride of her youth, traversing wide swaths of the American landscape in the company of a talking puppet, Victorian ghosts, and a family fueled by fantasy, dysfunction, and fierce love.

How did people who prided themselves on making everything from scratch manage to afford annual trips to Disney World? Did her mother really have psychic abilities? Why did her sensitive youngest nephew speak in a voice that wasn’t his own? How do family legacies of grief and dysfunction and creativity intersect? How can she escape her circumstances without replicating the escapist fantasies with which she was raised?

Teague attempts to understand and contextualize her family in terms of trauma and mental health, but also with deep love and humor. Carefully attuned to the vagaries of geographical cultures, she weaves her family’s history with explorations of pop culture and the specific cultures of the places she and her family pass through: a Texas city, an Victorian tourist town in Arkansas, a Southwest ghost town, Central Florida, the Bay Area, Kansas City, and a college town in the Inland Northwest.

Spinning Tea Cups will appeal to readers interested in American cultural studies, those concerned with the ongoing crisis of mental illness in this country, and anyone seeking to explore the dangerous and recuperative powers of fantasy.

Alexandra Teague is professor of English and co-director of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Idaho. She is the author of three volumes of poetry and a novel, The Principles Behind Flotation.