About

william romanowski, author and owner of this website.

What's in a (pen) name?

That which we call a pen name by any other name – a pseudonym or the French phrase nom de plume – is still a literary alias. An assumed name that writers use in the publishing world instead of their real names.

Learn more below !

Photo Credit: Monochrome Photography, 2022. ©

Samuel Clemens, the famous American satirist, went through an array before finally settling on the most celebrated pen name in American literature: Mark Twain. There is some scholarly debate over the origin and meaning of Clemens’ pseudonym.[1]

Is Mark Twain…

a nautical wordplay indicating two fathoms, the safe water depth for riverboats,
a pen name Clemens always liked and took possession of when the late Captain Isaiah Sellers “could no longer need that signature,”
a nickname the humorist acquired related to his bar tab at the Old Corner saloon in Virginia City, or
simply impossible to ascertain given the writer’s legendary reputation for telling tall tales (Clemens did not respond to requests for comment).

Authors might adopt a nom de plume to have a more distinctive name or disguise their authorship for some reason. Maybe to protect themselves from reprisal. Or for more practical reasons like marketing or an authorial brand. I went with one as much for fun as marketing and aesthetic reasons. Let’s be honest: Would you be more likely to pick up and read the back cover of a novel by Patmos Rhodes or William Romanowski?

And why Patmos Rhodes?

When I came up with my pen name, I did an online search to see if there was some person out there named Patmos Rhodes. There wasn’t. Whew. What came up in the search was a ferry schedule between two Greek islands in the Aegean Sea, Patmos and Rhodes. Perfect. A pen name that signified journey, which is what writing (and reading) has always been for me. A journey. A way to make sense of life.

Rhodes, the “island of the sun,” is famous for the Colossus of Rhodes, a statue of the Greek sun god Helios (one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World), and Patmos as the place where John, in exile, received the visions recorded in the Bible’s Book of Revelation, the last canonical book of the New Testament.[2]

Okay, one helluva pen name. Now who is the personage – in this case, noncelebrity – the hidden hand whose words appear are on the pages?

Call me Ish–, er, Bill, officially William Romanowski. I grew up in Wyoming Valley in northeastern Pennsylvania playing football and rock’n’roll (though I wasn’t very good at either). I earned an undergraduate degree in literature at Indiana University of Pennsylvania (hometown of Hollywood actor, Jimmy Stewart, who starred in two of Alfred Hitchcock finest films: Rear Window and Vertigo).

REFLECTING ON THE HEART OF ROCK AND ROLL

Retirement Series

Upon my retirement, working with a group of Calvin University film and media majors, we produced a video series bookending my career. Oddly enough, the Communication Department chair, Kathi Groenendyk, was a first-year student the year I arrived at Calvin on a research fellowship. She was in the audience for the last performance of my “Heart of Rock and Roll” show, which was filmed, and introducing the video series. I get to do a bit of reflecting interspersed with clips from show.

PART 1 - 10 min

PART 2 - 4 min

PART 3 - 5 min

Afterward, I embarked on an unusual career path. For just over a decade, I worked for the CCO (Coalition for Christian Outreach), a campus ministry based in Pittsburgh and sponsor of the annual Jubilee Conference. Eventually, in the role of staff specialist, I produced and toured “The Heart of Rock and Roll,” a lively multi-media show using popular music as the soundtrack of the shifting trends in American history and culture. Performing at venues in the United States and Canada, I mixed in medleys on piano and guitar, recalling the sounds that reflected the changing times: folk, blues, and country, Elvis Presley, the Beatles and Bob Dylan, Motown, disco, punk, and with the advent of MTV in the 1980s, New Wave.

Meanwhile, attending evening classes, I received an MA in English at Youngstown State University, and then entered a PhD program in American Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University in northwestern Ohio. While a doctoral student, I coauthored a book with a sociology professor, Risky Business: Rock in Film. The Journal of Popular Culture hailed it “A landmark study,” and a Film Quarterly critic deemed it “a veritable treasure of information that will be indispensable for the foreseeable future.”

ABD (all but dissertation) I accepted a research fellowship in the Calvin Center for Christian Scholarship, which began my tenure at then Calvin College. A resulting collaborative publication, Dancing in the Dark: Youth, Popular Culture and the Electronic Media, was endorsed by legendary journalist Bill Moyers: “Believers of every faith will find Dancing in the Dark a source of revelation and provocation as they try to make sense of contemporary American culture.” including professional conferences, endowed lectureships, colleges and universities, film and music festivals.

Critics commended my book, Pop Culture Wars: Religion and the Role of Entertainment in American Life, as “remarkably balanced,” “a stunning portrait of the interplay of religion and popular culture,” and “a compelling and fascinating account of the historical development of popular culture in America.”

My Eyes Wide Open: Looking for God in Popular Culture won an ECPA (Evangelical Christian Publisher’s Association) Gold Medallion Award. “From aesthetic to religious experience, Eyes Wide Open is a winner,” a critic exclaimed. Another remarked, “Of the growing number of books on the market exploring popular culture from the perspective of Christian faith, [Eyes Wide Open] is the best.”

A three-part DVD series based on Eyes Wide Open earned an Aegis Award (previous winners include NBC News, Warner Bros. Pay-TV, ESPN2 and the Discovery Channel), and a Communicator Award of Distinction.

I was honored and delighted to receive a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and Faculty Research Award in support of Reforming Hollywood: How American Protestants Fought for Freedom at the Movies. Published by Oxford University Press, this reassessment of Protestant-Hollywood relations has been called “authoritative,” “pathbreaking,” “remarkably fresh, significant, and fascinating.” A Christianity Today critic observed,

Film history has dealt Protestants a bad hand, and Romanowski’s meticulously researched book is a valuable contribution to a richer narrative, one that recognizes the profound contribution that Protestants have made to the shape of the American film industry.

When Cinematic Faith: A Christian Perspective on Movies and Meaning was published, a reviewer commented that my repertoire of written works had “made a significant contribution to the faith and pop culture discussion. These books are a feast for those wanting to develop a coherent understanding and reflective approach to the study of faith and pop culture.” (Should the occasion present itself, I would like to buy that person at least a drink, if not dinner.)

Over the years, my commentary has appeared in national news outlets, NPR Morning Edition, Christian Science Monitor, U.S. News & World Report, USA Today, Vox, and major metropolitan newspapers like the Orlando Sentinel, Miami Herald, Philadelphia Inquirer, Dallas Morning News, Detroit Free Press, and Toronto Star.

During my academic career, I discovered that I write to learn, and learn enough to write, and then some. And now, making the most of my background in film, literature, and culture – wait for it, wait for it – I am trading footnotes for fiction. I retired from teaching right into the Covid pandemic and settled nicely into spending long hours with my imaginary friends, which some of my real-life friends still find rather amusing.

I now have a completed manuscript of my first novel, CHEATING AGNES, and am pitching to literary agents. If you’re curious, click on the homepage to learn more. In the meantime, I’m working on two other novels, hoping to create stories that are excellent, entertaining, praiseworthy, and inspiring.

My world changed immediately and irrevocably when I was diagnosed with cancer. As much as anything else, having to live with a chronic disease made me come to terms with myself as never before.

I live in Grand Rapids, Michigan with Donna, my partner in love and life for almost fifty years. We share interests in sports, news, entertainment. Good food and fine wine. The Beatles, the symphony, and semi-Swifties (Go Taylor’s Boyfriend!). We are blessed with two adult children and a group of close friends. We laugh a lot together. The way the writer of Ecclesiastes puts it: “A man can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in his work.”

Footnotes

[1] Kevin Mac Donnell, “Mark Twain at Ten Paces: Facts Versus Fictions in the Origin of 'Mark Twain' as a Nom de Plume,” Mark Twain Journal, 57:1 (Spring 2019), 77-111, https://www.jstor.org/stable/45172069; Gary Scharnhorst, “Mark Twain’s “Nom de Plume” Redux: A Reply to Kevin Mac Donnell,” Mark Twain Journal, 57:2 (Fall 2019), 21-27, https://www.jstor.org/stable/45284567. Both accessed: 04-04-2024.

[2] If you’re looking for a way to make sense of John’s apocalyptic writings (what has two horns like a lamb, but speaks like a dragon?), might I recommend Calvin G. Seerveld’s, Bewondering God’s Dumbfounding doings: God talking to us little people (Jordan Station, ON, Canada: Paideia Press, 2020)? The author, a longtime friend, puts the craziest book of the Bible in the larger context of the Old and New Testament Scriptures.

PART 4 - 10 min

PART 5 - 4 min

PART 6 - 10 min