Alaska blogger Celtic Diva's identity is revealed

I got in touch by e-mail with Celtic Diva, who found out this week that she's been selected by the Democratic National Convention Committee for a press credential at the August convention. She'll join a corps of bloggers representing the 50 states, three territories, and interestingly enough, U.S. ex-pats in Argentina.

Celtic Diva's real name is Linda Kellen Biegel. She's something of a renaissance woman by Lower 48 standards, but she's a lot like other Alaskan women I've met who seem to invent and reinvent themselves in defiance of all prevailing conventions. In addition to having started a liberal blog (in Alaska!) in 2005, she's a mother, a columnist for the Anchorage Daily News, an events planner, a marketing/PR person, a singer, and a stage tech. For more than 20 years, she worked in construction, including the oil fields of Prudhoe Bay. Her extended family gathers together every June for subsistence set-net fishing for salmon at the mouth of the Kasilof River. She also fishes for halibut with her husband's family, who built a 24-foot aluminum boat called The Nevermore.

About her blog, Celtic Diva's Blue Oasis, she says, "I wasn't sure how political it was going to be, but part of the motivation was that I didn't see many Alaskan liberal blogs around. Now we have some really good progressive blogs, all with a little different point of view...just like most Alaskans."

Biegel applied for the credentials and was chosen despite the fact that hers, she says, is not "the most well-known or most-read progressive blog." She thinks having the flexibility to travel to Denver had something to do with the selection.

The other two contributors to her blog, who write under the handles Monocot and Kaerick, are her friends Kim and Erick Ellis. They live in Denver and are already planning to attend the convention as volunteers.

She took my comment about the Blogger template look of her blog in stride, saying, "One of these days I'll sit down with someone more Web site literate and make some changes. Until then the blog will remain 'homegrown!'"

• Lisa Albers is deputy editor of Crosscut and a Seattle freelance writer. She can be reached at lisa.albers@crosscut.com.