stephenrpell

As a child of the rural South in the 50s and being raised by a single mom, I had ample opportunity for a free range childhood. We had a few neighbors and there were a few kids roughly my age on our gravel country road. They were okay but I was more at home in the woods next to our property and some of my earliest friends were rabbits and squirrels. At least in my mind. As an only child, I had the unfortunate opportunity to grow up thinking anything I thought of was automatically correct. It took several lessons both in and out of the classroom in elementary school to see the error of my ways.

In junior high I discovered the power of words when I talked a large classmate out of beating me up at our eighth grade picnic. I literally calmed him enough that he sat back down at our table and we all finished our meal and I did not wind up in the hospital.

Ever since then I have considered words my friends. They are powerful and can induce feelings of joy or bring on despair. I certainly don’t consider myself to be the best writer of all time, but I can tell you when a story idea comes, I listen. If I am really lucky, the story will agree to tell itself through me. There are a million new writers out there doing some great work. Once you have read one of my stories, I hope you enjoy it enough to include me in that group. 

As for cred, I have a BS degree in communications with honors from the University of Tennessee. I have not entered many contests, but have won some of those I participated in. In the case of the Chattanooga Writers Guild, I believe it was in their 2016 Spring Writing Competition I won both first and second place in the fiction category.

At this writing I have been married to Betsy B. Pell for fifty four years. Among her numerous acts on my behalf, she nursed me through two and a half years of chemotherapy for lymphoma. Without her none of my creative efforts would have even happened. She truly is the reason I am even here today.