Nom de plume

A few years ago I used to wonder why people had pen names, especially when it was no secret who they actually were. And now I’m about to have a book released under a pen name so I thought it would be interesting to share my reasons. The primary reason is that I write for both adults and children; while I may not have considered that a problem in the past, I have now spent a lot of time in bookshops (reading mainly, of course, because my budget can’t cover the extent of my consumption) and noticed how people order books (it’s not dissimilar to the way some revellers request songs from a DJ in a night club). I’ve overheard grandparents come in and say things like: ‘I want that book by so-and-so as a present for my grandchild’ – which is fine if you have a perceptive bookseller. But imagine if the grandchild in question was actually a child and you had a dozy bookseller who picked out the latest book you had written for adults and handed it over. Not a great result.

So now I understand why someone who writes in two genres might want to make a distinction by name – particularly in this literary era when marketing departments lean so much on typecasting to promote books. My own pen name is K.P. Kojo, which stands for Kwamina Parkes bi Kojo (which translates roughly as Kwamina Parkes’s son who was born on Monday), and it’s the name that I will be using for my published work for children. The first book that will be released under the name will be my retellings of Ananse stories for Frances Lincoln – The Parade – which will be released in 2010. After that, I will be releasing some poetry and some original stories for children.

I have to confess that although I have written for children for many years, I haven’t felt motivated to compile the work into publishable form because I always saw it as a side interest, but now that I have a pen name, I have this burning desire to build a publishing history for this K.P. Kojo fellow. It’s fantastic to have that kind of compulsion, the best feeling. Another reason why I am doing this now is that that many writers/poets I know don’t like to work with younger kids because they are not sure that they can relate and I’m hoping that by stepping into the arena, I will be able to attract some of my fellow writers with very interesting ideas and voices, to venture into publishing for children too. People think of writing for children as a complicated task; my advice is to try being a kid again, I wrote my poem ‘Wrong Side’ when I remembered the amazement I used to feel as a child when I was told a good fib, something I knew shouldn’t make sense but sounded so convincing (the same suspension of disbelief we continue to practise as adults when we see a film); I used the idea of the dream state to turn the entire world upside down and I had the best time writing it. What I have found difficult, psychologically, is writing children’s stories down; because I have tended to be a live storyteller and in that context you can tell what is understood and what isn’t, I’m never quite sure what will be alright in print. Will it still be okay when I’m not there to pull faces and bring the story to life? I guess that’s what illustrators are for!