“The prospect of becoming an influencer to promote my work feels like a betrayal of the language that represents me and this storytelling struggle.” An aspiring writer contemplates the pursuit of anonymity in an industry built on just the opposite…
by: Miranda Jensen
I’m a writer — or so I tell myself.
When one teeters in the unflattering limbo between drafts and publications, seemingly innocent titles like “writer” come off as idealistic. Can I — who has only paid to write within the confines of the infamous MFA, but has never been paid to write — identify with the writing profession? My friends also struggle with these semantics in their professions: Are line chefs, chefs? Research assistants, researchers? Substitute teachers, teachers? We twenty-somethings often dish out occupation titles, whether bold or unassuming, depending on our audience. Given that readers of Across the Margin, unlike my parents, are likely cautious with literary affirmations, allow me to rephrase my introduction.
I’m an aspiring writer — freshly graduated and utterly unpublished.
Storytelling has always been my lifeline, a morally grey escape and education that held me through chronic illness, the horrors of high school and higher education, and queer epiphanies. But only recently have I abandoned the comfortable, critical role of reader for the precarious life of an aspiring writer. Only recently have I understood that publishing has little to do with the stories themselves.
Indeed, it’s probably not my unpublished oeuvre of novels and short stories that prompted you to click this article, but rather my pursuit of anonymity in an industry built on just the opposite. What interests audiences today is the nervous tap dance writers flap-heel around their actual work, divulging not their characters’ oddities and insecurities, but their own. As Rebecca Jennings describes in her Vox article, “Everyone’s a sellout now”: “Under the tyranny of algorithmic media distribution, artists, authors — anyone whose work concerns itself with what it means to be human — now have to be entrepreneurs, too.” In other words, the age of cyber confessions asserts an author’s authority not just on the page, but in persona. Readers desire to understand the creators of remarkable creations. They rummage through carefully curated posts for all things personal: writing methods, sexualities, traumas, current drafts, ethnicities, inspirations, families, and politics. If I wish to move the world with my artistry, I must impress an identity on that phantasmic shadow we call a digital footprint.
And yet, I — a not-quite-writer, and certainly not-yet-author — dare to use a pen name. Miranda Jensen.
The prevailing common sense of the publishing industry suggests that I’m a fool for it. I consistently encounter submission guidelines that disallow pseudonyms, from the likes of small literary journals to the Modern Love column in the New York Times. Headshots are the finishing touch to almost every novel, and biographies attract potential readers in bookstores both local and Amazonic. The more I turn away from writing as craft to writing as “profession,” the more I understand that any distance between myself and my stories may work against my literary success. Or so it seems in the oversaturated cult of “BookTok,” once “BookTube,”,full of author cameos and appraisals that too often neglect BIPOC and queer writers. So it seems in jam-packed book releases and author panels featuring the white women ruling the world of YA or the intellectual men at the helm of literary fiction. So it seems in substacks and query letters aiming for authenticity, validated by impressive social followings. As I summon the courage to seek out an agent, I fear my polished final draft will matter little without a polished authorial persona to sell not only my work, but in the end, myself.
Of course, society’s desire for literary celebrities is not novel, not even for novels. Each of the classics — a category vaguely defined along Western norms —contains a folkloric inception eagerly supplied in novel introductions. Orwell’s totalitarian terrors, Conrad’s adventure up the Convo River, and Carroll’s fairy tales for Alice Liddell are geneses discussed and contested as deeply as the stories themselves. Case in point, the ghost story contest that inspired Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is so beloved that astronomers discovered the exact hour Mary Shelley conceived it.
Much of the world’s beloved wordsmiths have been dissected and scrutinized in the name of historical analysis, from publishing letter correspondence to diary entries. I can only imagine how appalled the likes of Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, and Sylvia Plath would be to find the general public pouring over their intimate thoughts, debating their sexuality and sanity. In a world so seemingly enamored with consent, it is quite troubling that such principles amount to nothing for the dearly deceased. What revelations will the next generations uncover from Zadie Smith, Margaret Atwood, and Arundhati Roy’s search history?
While the world of literature has always suffered from the plague of the fanatic, the neoliberal rollercoaster of the last few decades has largely shifted the burden of publicity away from the public, and into the hands of the authors themselves. Jess Row emphasizes the parasocial epidemic of today’s publishing industry in “Generation Franchise: Why Writers Are Forced to Become Brands (and Why That’s Bad),” tracing how marketing in the writing world has (d)evolved into that of the influencers. Instead of spotlighting their writing, authors platform themselves in writing routines and day-in-the-lifes. The transition from prying fans to divulging authors carries a deceiving appearance of empowerment. However, this new form of content creation is the latest symptom of a society sick with capital, and more specifically for literature, a canon confined to profit. Instead of developing community along literary lines, the publishing industry fans the flames of idolatry because the writing of idols sells.
A pen name, perhaps, is a modest resistance to the established order of publication by public personalities. But my pseudonystic urges don’t emerge from a single site. A part of me craves the impossibility of it all, to maintain any semblance of anonymity in an industry teeming with literary celebrities would be quite the feat. I’m also averse to fame, especially of the facial kind. I can barely tolerate social interaction as it is. And to be quite frank, I take the Deleuzian approach to secrecy — “Academics’ lives are seldom interesting” — as I find my life rather dull in comparison to that of my characters. I don’t intend to be self-deprecating. Writers, I have surmised as both a reader and student of the craft, tend to lead unextraordinary lives and wield extraordinary imaginations. The life of the introvert, the home-body, is well-suited for the under-appreciated discipline of writing; though our processes dramatically differ, we writers (or in my case, wannabe-writer) converge on axes of time typing or scribing. (It is a wonder we try to make money off of such a slow craft.)
Above all, literature is what writers devote themselves to. For some, at the cost of personal relationships, financial stability, and mental health. I use a pen name because who I am day-to-day is not my chosen form of expression. In conversation, in appearance, and especially in thought, I’m influenced by systems of power that I abhor. In writing, however, I find the quiet solitude to thoughtfully resist the structures of sexism, racism, and homophobia that determine us all. It is a battle I wage every time I pick up a pen, and one I don’t always win. The prospect of becoming an influencer to promote my work feels like a betrayal of the language that represents me and this storytelling struggle.
I don’t mean to suggest that in resisting the culture of the writing “profession” we should turn to absolute anonymity. Pen names have been used for malicious means. Michael Derrick Hudson published his poetry under the pen name Yi-Fen Chou as he perceived the writing of Asian women as more likely to be recognized than that of a white man. Such a reductive misconception disregards how the publishing industry underpays writers-of-color for stories solely about their traumas, and like the rest of the corporate world, utilizes their “diverse” identities for facades of diversity. Literary DEI initiatives, like pen names, ultimately do not challenge the socio-economic system that historically neglected and presently exploits marginalized writers for profits. Anonymity is not a substitution for liberation.
Pseudonyms, however, have to do with more than the politics of names and identities. Writers at times modify their names along aesthetic and/or sentimental lines. For instance, the “Горький” of the pseudonym Maxim Gorky means bitter, an adjective that characterizes Gorky’s style (this Soviet pen name tradition was mimicked in The Master and Margarita with the character Ivan Bezdomny, which means “homeless” in Russian). Unique pen names, similar to stage names, can also help differentiate authors. For example, Dr. Seuss. On the other hand, pseudonyms have been methods of publishing in the face of prejudice along the lines of gender, race, or sexuality such as “George Eliot,” “Michael Field,” and “Arnold Petri,” whose legal names, like my own, I have no intention of outing. It is this tradition I relate to most, particularly that of queer women who published under false names in order to live out their day-to-day affairs in relative peace. A level of security, as well as conformity, comes with anonymity in the publishing world. By using “Miranda Jensen” I seek not necessarily the idolatrous dimensions of the publishing industry but, perhaps, to accommodate myself within it.
It is a disappointing solution, then, my pen name — an individual’s attempt at working within the system instead of challenging it collectively. That is another lesson I’ve learned in my recent studies of the “writer” profession. After graduation, writing quickly becomes solitary. Like the names at the bottom of book covers, we write alone, isolated with only our mind for company. Perhaps that is more fodder for the writer’s public persona. What kind of person can survive that artistic solitude? What kind of monster scribbles in the dark, and once the light of day has seen the novel, chooses to return to the cave?
You know the cliche, never meet your role model? More than once I’ve been devastatingly disappointed when my interpretation of a work contradicts that of the author’s. Our life experiences and material circumstances inevitably influence how we understand works of art, even our own. That is to say, to paraphrase feminist and Black liberatory activists, the personal is absolutely political, and the relationship between an author’s intent/identity and their work’s meaning is inseparable. I suggest, however, that presently we privilege that basic analysis over others. We privilege the writer, an individual, over the readers, a collective.
In the spirit of Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” and Michel Foucault’s “What is an Author?,” what if we, once again, relegated the authority of the author, this time specifically their celebrity persona, and instead found meaning within the text? How might our literary understandings change if we recognize the function that the celebrity author persona plays in today’s process of interpreting literature? There is something unexpectedly democratic in a book club that pieces together significance in spite of whatever the book’s dictator, also known as the author, envisioned. Must I sit in front of a camera and divulge the queer imaginings and uncertainties that prompted my novel of speculative fiction? I can — as in, I’m capable of such a task — but is it so naive to wish for my work to speak for itself? By privileging one interpretation, that of the creator, we temper the voices of the collective — the very literary community that the mission statements of the publishing industry claim to cultivate.
There are pieces of me in all of my works, of course, including this essay. I could not deny the lavender pink, slimy evidence of my identity splattered across my prose, plots, and above all, dramatis personae. But to know me — “Miranda Jensen” — through the words that compose my stories is a different kind of familiarity than one with the woman behind the pseudonym.
With the confidence of a writer uncontracted, I don the mask of Miranda in sight of something beyond names legal or conceived. In sight of an industry that celebrates and critiques the work itself without caricaturing authorial intention and identity for the purposes of profit. In sight of a literary community that understands the “writer” not as a public figure, an entrepreneur, or an icon.
But as a storyteller.
Yes, I think I’ll stick to that title in the future.
Miranda Jensen is a creative activist with roots in the Bay Area. Through her writing and critical theory, she seeks not merely to interpret the world, but to change it.
Header art by Guda Koster.
