Suggested by Shaker Redlady50, who finds fascinating the vast and varied handles used by the Shakers: "Some are very straightforward...a name, a location, or a hobby. But with other handles that are not so straightforward, I find myself wondering, does this mean something? Is there a story behind oddjob, stonebiscuit, Phoenician in a time of Romans, SunlessNick, or CBrachyrhynchos? There's certainly a story behind my choice, and I'll bet others would have stories to tell as well. So my suggestion for a Question of the Day is: Is there a story behind your screen name? With so many available words or combinations of letters, why did you choose your particular handle?"
My handle now is just my name, of course, but I chose Shakespeare's Sister (which used to be my pseudonym as well as the blog's name) because it's the name of a great Smiths' song containing the bleeding-heart blog-perfect line: "I thought that if you had an acoustic guitar, it meant that you were a protest singer. I can smile about it now, but at the time it was terrible." (You can't get too self-important with that line on your mind.)
And there was the added layer of profound import that Mozza had nicked the term from Virginia Woolf's essay A Room of One's Own about female writers and their need for their own spaces. It was, after all, in part because I longed for a blog without rampant misogyny in the comments threads, but couldn't find one, that I started this blog in the first place and do my best to maintain it as a safe space. So, even as Melissa McEwan, I am (still) Shakespeare's Sister.
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