bellascribe

Bio

My name is Peg Alford Pursell, and I’m a writer, editor, and upon occasion, still, a teacher.

I’ve a degree in education and earned my Masters of Fine Arts in creative writing from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, where I worked with some of the best contemporary fiction writers in the country and where I met my husband, also a fiction writer. We lived together in Charleston, SC, for about a decade before moving to Charlottesville, VA, most happily, in September 2006. **Update: And then, quite unexpectedly and not so happily, to Cincinnati in February (2007). I am determined to enjoy living here, nonetheless, and have a few ideas and projects in mind to help.

Writing and editing
I make my living these days as a freelance writer and editor. Though I can and do write for clients with all kinds of writing needs (from ghost writing to technical writing to public relations copy to educational content and on), I particularly like writing about science and research, making the complex understandable and engaging. As a result of my tenure writing and editing for the S.C. Sea Grant Consortium, issues of coastal living and marine biology especially interest me. I also took a turn as the fiction editor for Identitytheory.com.

I continue to write fiction, though this writing enters and exits hiatus status regularly. I have received some nice awards and recognition for my fiction from such organizations as the S.C. Academy of Authors, the South Carolina Arts Commission, and the South Carolina State Fiction Project. I was also once a finalist for The Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction.

Other endeavors

I put together the first Charleston Celebrates National Poetry Month and the Writers in Residence Program at the Charleston Family Y program; served as the S.C. state coordinator of the annual International Marine and Coast Cleanup; worked as a volunteer coordinator for the city’s homeless shelter; and mentored several at-risk youth.

I’ve given creativity and journal writing workshops; have made and sold functional art (lamps, chairs, tables etc) at venues such as the East Bay Gallery and by a few lucky commissions; and replaced a decades-long running obsession with bike riding.
This blog

Though this blog has been described – and pleasingly so – as “a well-written blog with a literary bent,” I can’t and don’t claim that it is literary blog, or even that it is all that well-written. I highlight whatever interests me. More often than not what interests me is about all manner of things not literary, what I am not writing about or focusing on in my work elsewhere.

This blog is more of a repository, somewhat like the deep desk drawer that Virginia Woolf conceptualized her diary as being. When I work at my writing, I work at it elsewhere. I began using the blog long ago as a way of recording and documenting mainly for myself, but things changed somewhere along the way once I understood others are reading along.

In the case of poems I share in my posts, I believe they fall under the doctrine of “fair use” presented as they are as starting points for commentary and discussions. If you believe a poem should not be on my website for any reason, please write explaining why, and I’ll be glad to remove it. I respect the right of poets to control their work and respect their right to profit from the sale of poetry books. In the same spirit, I encourage readers to support the work of writers they encounter here and admire by buying their books.
I still have no satisfying solution to the way defining categories feels limiting and confining; thus, all post entries go into the “uncategorized” bin. I will probably begin using tags sometime in the near future.

I have been using the excellent WordPress since I began keeping a blog.
I don’t have a blogroll per se since an endless list of names on a blogroll typifies for me an undiscerning approach to sharing links. There is no way I can regularly read dozens of content-rich blogs every day, and to provide links to blogs I don’t actually read on a regular basis feels wrong. I link to sites or blogs that catch my attention as organic parts of one of my posts.

Comments are very welcome. Because of spam, commenters have to register the first time. I don’t always comment back, but I read and appreciate all comments. Email is fine, too. You can get in touch with me by writing “bellascribe at gmail dot com.”