Wells Teague
Bewildering Stories biography
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I am a graduate of Texas Tech University (Music) and of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I’ve published Calling Texas Home, a book of Texana; Theo the Indian Fighter (for third- and fourth-graders); and the eBook series Bright Red Alligator for young children.
My literary fiction has appeared in such magazines as TriQuarterly, fiction international, and Chicago Review. I’m a founding member of alleywriters, the infamous group of writers, filmsters, actors, and magicians who meet in an alleyway bunker beneath a barbershop on South Congress (SoCo) in Austin, Texas.
The history of “A Reasonable Life” might be interesting to readers. One night in 1973 I dreamed a complete story about a great white boar playing in the spray of a barrier island. Awakening with the story ready to be told, I typed it up and mailed it to Joe David Bellamy at fiction international, who had published my first story in The Falcon while he was on the faculty at Mansfield State College. Joe accepted it, and the story appeared in fiction international 2/3 in 1974.
In this story the boar was imbued with the innocence of a human child, and seemed to belong to a pampered and selfish man who had built a mansion that looked out to the open sea straight into the face of an inevitable hurricane. In the dream I felt an incipient tragedy among the boar and the master, his wife, their baby, and the villagers.
More than 30 years later I found myself working on a group of modern-day, linked stories involving Americans on a barrier island off the coast of Belize. Soon, these characters were snorkeling above the site of a villa destroyed by a hurricane more than 150 years earlier. “A Reasonable Life” revisited me, and I recognized that it as the backdrop. I’m calling the collection “Shards” after the broken tea cups in the old story. We shall see if I can make these new stories frolic, scream, and bleed.
Copyright © 2013 by Wells Teague
