In the Spotlight: Peg Alford Pursell
With stories that center on connection, belonging and redemption, Peg Alford Pursell’s collection of stories, A Girl Goes Into the Forest, explores the relationships between women in all stages of life and delves into the strength and fragility of the relationships that bind us all.
This week, Peg is In The Spotlight where she shares her insight on writing about what we fear, staying motivated, her writing process and why Peg created WTAW Press.
Did you always know you wanted to be a writer? Or did it come to you later in life?
Though I wrote stories and “books” from an early age, I never considered becoming a writer. Growing up where I did, I wouldn’t have thought it a possibility. I knew no one who wrote, had never met a writer, and there was no bookstore, not even in the two closest cities. To consider becoming a writer would have been akin to becoming a movie star, and practical occupations were encouraged. Yet, I always wrote. During my undergraduate years as an education major, I took as many writing and lit classes as I could, and won the college’s humanities poetry award. I moved, met writers, and encountered the “unglamorous” landscape of writing and publishing, and after having a handful of publications and awards, entered the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, a low residency program that allowed me to continue working while I studied. A necessity, since I was by then a single mother of two children.
How do ideas come to you? In scenes, through a character, personal experience?
Most often I wake up with the sounds of words and phrases in my head and I go directly into writing them down, see what develops from there. From getting those initial words down, scenes arise—place and sensory details, the characters. The sonics of language seem first, but I’m also fairly visual. Characters and their situations materialize from place and setting.
How do you decide when a piece has ended?
Often I know a piece has ended when I feel that visceral sense of, ah, yes, this is it. I like endings to contain an expansiveness within the closure. If I have difficulty, if the sense of the right ending eludes me, I put distance between the piece and the intellectual process. I believe a sort of problem-solving continues while I’m working on other things, going about my daily business. On some level of consciousness, the piece is there seeking its completion. It may take some time for an ending to come. Even years. In the case of discovering an ending that resists that process of revisiting the story and fiddling with it, I focus most on the story’s opening, since I think that the ending is subtly found in the beginning. It can turn out that a story isn’t opening in the best place.
How much of your stories are writing through your own, personal fears? In A Girl Goes Into a Forest you write about terminal illnesses, estranged daughters, aging parents and death; all the issues that I am on the precipice of and have begun to think more and more about.
I don’t write autobiographically, but probably all, to some degree or another. I think that’s what writers do: write through not only their fears but through their questions and doubts, even if they might not set out to write about, say, the fear of losing a loved one. My biggest questions are most humans’ biggest questions. What exactly are we doing here? Where are we going after we aren’t? Are we loved? Do we belong? Questions predicated on our fears. Existential dread. I write about these.
What motivates you to stay in the chair and write when a hundred other things are screaming for your attention?
I write first thing very early in the morning, before the demands of the day can take hold, a ritual I’ve cultivated for years. The reality is I could stay in that liminal, trance-like state of writing for most of my day, and sometimes it’s exceedingly difficult to tear myself away and take care of work.
What made you start WTAW Press?
Essentially, I grew increasingly distressed at the lack of publishing opportunities for brilliant, important, beautiful manuscripts I’d read from other writers. Since I’d created a platform with the reading series I’d founded in 2010, it seemed the Press would have a decent foundation to build upon. So after spending a few years researching publishing and interrogating my ability to do the work required to be the kind of publisher I could take pride in, I founded the WTAW Press.
Peg Alford Pursell is the author of A GIRL GOES INTO THE FOREST, (Dzanc Books, July 2019), and of SHOW HER A FLOWER, A BIRD, A SHADOW, the 2017 Indies Book of the Year for Literary Fiction. Her work has been published in many journals and anthologies, including Joyland, Woven Tales Press, and Waxwing. Most recently, her microfiction, flash fiction, and hybrid prose have been nominated for Best Small Microfictions and Pushcart Prizes. She is the founder and director of WTAW Press, a nonprofit publisher of literary books, and of Why There Are Words, the national literary reading series. She is a member of the SF Writers Grotto.
About Autumn Shah
Autumn Shah is a personal essay and fiction writer. She lives in the burbs with her husband and two daughters. She works as a middle school library aide and is an avid reader of middle grade, YA and adult fiction and nonfiction. You can find her essays in various online literary journals and see what she's currently reading on Goodreads or Instagram.