The History of Sinclair

I’ve been thinking about pen names ever since I asked Christopher, a former intern, what he would use as his pen name for last week’s Canvas piece and he unhesitatingly answered, “Alabaster Sinclair.” He didn’t only have his pen name ready, meaning he’d already put a lot of thought into this, but he was eager enough to share it that, after telling me the name, he jokingly added that he’d “waited for the day for someone to ask [him] that.”

With social media, pen names are a lot more common, but they lose the sense of anonymity they used to have. For example, when Mary Anne Evans chose her pen name, George Eliot, it was done with the intention of separating herself (her private life, her past works, her status as a female author) from the supposed male author, Eliot.

This isn’t necessarily the sole purpose behind pen names anymore: artists and writers on social media platforms post works under a pen name, such as “Batcii” on Tumblr, while not hiding their real name or private life from their followers. In the case of Batcii (Sas Milledge), the pseudonym serves to separate her personal blog from her professional account: her personal works, often fanart and categorized as such, is posted under Batcii, while everything in her online folio is posted under her real name. Even though fanart is often posted to her online folio, she doesn’t categorize it as fanart under the tags, rather just general pieces that she’s worked on.

That doesn’t mean, however, that the anonymity aspect isn’t still relevant when it comes to pen names: Banksy’s identity is still unknown thanks to his pseudonym, and from a more common perspective, non-name based usernames on fanwork cites like ArchiveofOurOwn (AO3) are all technically pen names that provide anonymity for those who seek it, even though some users still choose to connect their AO3 to their Twitter or Tumblr.

Because pen names are so personal to people, I thought it’d be fun compiling a list of pen names belonging to people I know:

Rosie Eloise (R.E)
Margaux Petrov-Weber
Mauricio
I.C. Frost
Paisley Moon
Whiteman McGee
Janet Snakehole
Kwon
Ariel Pendragon
Uguisu (鶯)

-L