I've gone through also a complicated journey with what name to use.
My first few tries did not work well and ultimately I felt it was best to just go with my first name. Among the issues I faced, which was the initial two pen names I chose turned out to be the same name as another poet on the exact same trajectory as me and I didn't want to have our work confused. I've thought about appending something at the end to distinguish my work now from other's named River but I've held back because I don't want to run into the problem of how to connect my work all together in ever rotating change of last names unless I really settle on a permanent one.
Its really interesting to see the process that others use to select their public facing name and to see what people have in common and are different (I would love to read how others did it in the comments as well)
I've gone through also a complicated journey with what name to use.
My first few tries did not work well and ultimately I felt it was best to just go with my first name. Among the issues I faced, which was the initial two pen names I chose turned out to be the same name as another poet on the exact same trajectory as me and I didn't want to have our work confused. I've thought about appending something at the end to distinguish my work now from other's named River but I've held back because I don't want to run into the problem of how to connect my work all together in ever rotating change of last names unless I really settle on a permanent one.
Its really interesting to see the process that others use to select their public facing name and to see what people have in common and are different (I would love to read how others did it in the comments as well)