Why Annie Moon?
Why Annie Moon?
I’ve had a love-hate relationship with my name. I mean, let’s face it… Coccioli? As a child in urban Union City, NJ, I wasn’t happy about having a surname that could be manipulated into cocky or caca, words that both mean feces. Even teachers in school would screw up their faces in doubt about the pronunciation. Consequently, I couldn’t wait to get married and take on an easy, short name, which I did. Only to realize that strangers could mess up a three-letter name as much as they did Coccioli.
It wasn’t until I visited Lecce, Italy where my father came from that when having to give my surname, I didn’t have to repeat myself three times and spell it out. Thus, it was during my inaugural trip to the country of my heritage that for the first time I appreciated both the culture I was born into and the sound of my name on the lips of strangers that made me feel welcomed. Consequently, after my divorce, I reverted to my given name with joy. When I published The Yellow Braid and Paradise, there was no question I’d use anything but Karen Anne Coccioli.
Just as I was embarrassed by my name as a child, I remained closeted for many years regarding not only my sexuality but also, my androgynous nature and my deep-seeded attraction to the dark mysteries of life. My self-discovery regarding my salacious tendencies bled into my writing. Soon I was giving myself permission to write the kind of erotica that for years I only read and kept my creativity under a tight rein. When I became involved in the BDSM community and was welcomed with opened arms, I finally felt accepted for who I was—the strange, androgynous, queer writer. I began to let loose in my writing. In the Pansy Park series, there’s a very obvious evolution in the tropes and the characters from censoring what I wrote to being real to the very core of my being.
In my books, especially in the Luca Duology, since I began to tap into deep desires and fantasies, I felt myself metamorphosize along with my writing and decided I wanted to write under a pen name that represented my evolution. Once the decision was made, choosing a name was easy. I never felt comfortable with Karen and wished my immigrant mother would’ve picked a name that like Coccioli represented our heritage instead of going with one that happened to be popular in America at the time. Anne was more acceptable but I felt more like an Annie. And not so unlike millions of others, I was always intrigued by the full moon. The Harvest Moon comes around my birthday but mostly, it was the discovery of the Luna Farside Highlands Problem that dates back to 1959 when the Soviet spacecraft transmitted the first images of the “dark” side of the moon…the strange and inexplicable mysteries that dated back to Ancient times.
Annie Moon. The name felt right and the more books I write, the more I’m stimulated by our deepest, darkest mysteries. In my book, Paradise, which is inspired by my real life, I sum up what the moon means to me:
No one ever came up after me. The stairwell was steep and narrow. The steps were hardly deep enough to fit an adult-sized foot. In my aloneness, I wrote. I made up poems about tearful flowers and disembodied figures inside houses without windows and doors. When I was older and exposed to various painters and art forms, I identified with the works of Salvador Dali. Like his anchorless objects floating in space, I squeezed my eyes shut and wrote about them drifting high above my body. I had the ability to look down at my father from a place far beyond as he caressed my vagina and I made believe the girl I saw wasn’t me.
The winters in New Jersey growing up brought early sunsets, and even when there was no moon, I never turned on the lamp. The coalescing lights from the houses of neighbors were enough to light my page. I breathed easy, comforted in my voiceless dark where the only words were on paper. My poetry appeared vague and unintelligible. I wrote in metaphor, so I didn’t risk my family—my parents, my sister, my aunt, or Nonna—spying on my writing and understanding what I meant beneath the abstraction.
