Yes, “Jennie St. Thomas” is a pen name. It is a doing business as (d/b/a) name that I use for my original creative writing. Since I use it as such, I am also able to hold copyrights using that name.
My friends, family, and co-workers know that I write creatively, and many of them are also aware of both of my pen names: Jennie St. Thomas for original fiction, and Cat Lady Firebird for fan fiction.
However, I’m picky about people from the general public — i.e., people I don’t know — being able to find my creative writing work simply by doing an Internet search on my legal name. I also prefer to reserve my legal name for the bits and pieces of non-fiction work that I occasionally write.
Creative writers who work in the corporate world face a dilemma: we want to publicize our work, but at the same time, we want to reassure our employers that we emphatically are not doing our creative writing activities during working hours. This is particularly true for those of us, like me, whose corporate jobs are not writing-adjacent (such as editing or teaching).
A pen name solves this issue for me, since it lets me curate knowledge of my creative writing; yes, I tell my corporate employer(s) alongside the others in real life. But I only do so while repeating a reassurance that I’m fine with them monitoring to see that I’m not writing while I’m supposed to be working for them. I also prefer to be with an employer for at least a year or two before discussing this particular activity.
I’m not ashamed of being a writer; nor am I trying to hide it. But the wrong information in the wrong hands could spell trouble, particularly if someone doesn’t assume good faith. I’m old enough to remember the 2001 Dooce incident as it happened. After the dust settled, Heather’s primary piece of advice was: be ye not so stupid.
It’s advice well worth remembering for anyone who creates content on the web, even if only in the form of occasional comments on others’ sites.
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The next logical question, of course, is: where did your pen name come from?
That’s a good question, and pen names should always be selected carefully. In my case, I selected the first (given) name and last name (surname) separately.
“Jennie” is a nickname for my legal middle name. (Friends, family, and co-workers call me by my first name.) It’s also the name — sometimes legally, sometimes as a nickname — used by several ancestors whose stories I find compelling. They almost all used the -ie spelling instead of the -y spelling, so my continuation of that is an homage to them.
“St. Thomas” is related to the fact that both my husband and I have strong enough devotions to a St. Thomas that we nearly used the name at our Confirmations. In his case, it was St. Thomas the Apostle; in mine, St. Thomas More. However, in both our cases, we ultimately chose to go with different names. This parallelism in our lives becomes particularly striking when we consider the original meaning of the name.
However, since the first name “Jennie” and the last name “Thomas” are both fairly common in the United States, the name “Jennie Thomas” wasn’t unique enough to stand out. Adding the “St.” prefix in front of created a distinction, and it’s also consistent with other surnames in the English-speaking world. It also better honors my reason for choosing the name in the first place.