Why the Jamaica Novels Are Not Under My Name.

The question comes up often enough to be worth answering properly. Why is the Jamaican literary fiction not published under Nikki Woods, when Nikki Woods is the name with the radio history, the Wikipedia entry and the press attached to it?

The commercial answer is real but small. It is the one I gave in the pen names piece: a reader navigates by author before publisher, and one name carrying both a Jamaican novel about drowned villages and a why-choose paranormal romance stops telling anyone anything.

The actual answer is different.

It is not a disguise

Most pen names are constructions. A writer invents a person to carry a kind of book — a harder-sounding name for crime, a softer one for romance, something neutral to hide a gender a market is assumed to reject.

That is not what happened here. I did not invent another woman to write these books. I went back and got the one who was there before the public career.

Two bodies of work, not one hidden behind the other

Nikki Woods is the public-facing name. Radio, media, the company, the coaching work, the press itself. That name has spent twenty years in rooms where the job was visibility — making things heard, making things land, deciding what got amplified.

Lorna Phillips is not doing that job. The novels under that name are about land, ancestry, water and generational memory, and they are set in the Jamaican interior in places my mother’s family is actually from. Swift River takes place in a Portland Parish valley the floods emptied between 1932 and 1943, which is where my great-grandmother Alexandrina was born in 1881.

Provision Ground moves west, to Askenish in the parish of Hanover, where a family has held ground for a hundred years without a deed, and where the surname came from Ross-shire by way of an estate.

That work does not want a media name on it. It wants the name that belongs to the place.

What the separation protects

Two things, and they run in opposite directions.

It protects the reader, who gets a name that tells them what they are holding. And it protects the work, which is not written to be visible. Nobody in Swift River was ever asked whether their story was commercial enough. The novels are an attempt to hold that ground rather than to perform on it.

There is a version of this book that arrives with a well-known byline and a press push behind it. That version would sell more copies in the first month. It would also be a different book, because it would have been written with an audience in the room.

Both names, one House

None of this is secrecy. The press is mine, the catalog carries both names, and this page says so plainly. The American-set literary fiction carries a name of its own for the same reason: L.J. Porter.

What the two names do is keep two kinds of attention apart — the kind that reaches outward, and the kind that goes down into a record and stays there.

Frequently asked questions

Is Lorna Phillips a pen name?

Not an invented one. Lorna Phillips is Nikki Woods’s Jamaican birth name, and it is the name her Jamaica-set literary fiction is published under.

Why aren’t the Jamaica novels published under Nikki Woods?

Nikki Woods is the public-facing name, carrying the radio career, the media work and the press. The Jamaica novels are about land, ancestry and generational memory, and they carry the name that belongs to the place.

What does Lorna Phillips write?

Literary fiction set in the Jamaican interior, in places her mother’s family is from. Swift River, set in Portland Parish, and Provision Ground: The Land They Could Not Prove, set in Askenish, Hanover.