I don't think that I have ever formally explained why my Twitter handle and the address for this website is wilcomoore. Seeing as I'm wiped from tending to a sick four year old, preaching a sermon, and my first two substitute teaching gigs, now seems as good a time as any for that short and pretty underwhelming story.
My story begins, as it does for many guys my age, with a video game. My senior year in college I spent a far amount of time hanging out in my brother Taylor's dorm room playing NBA Street Vol. 2 with him and his roommate T.J. When it came time to create a player, I wanted to come up with a cool name for the digital version of myself who would rain three-pointers and dunk on guys a foot and a half taller than me.
If you flash back a few years from that point, my all-purpose pseudonym was Johann Shefshesky. Why Johann Shefshesky? One summer at camp, we had a scene set a high school graduation and I thought the name Johann Shefshesky was funny and so I went with that.
Another question one might have is: Why do you have an all-purpose pseudonym? I think that can be traced back to watching a lot of Seinfeld, which taught me the value of a fake name. Each of the main characters (with maybe the exception of Elaine, though I could be wrong) had an alternate identity that they employed for a variety of reasons. The most prominent of those alternate personas was George Costanza's importer-exporter Art Vandelay. So I've always figured it was a good idea to have a fake name handy.
Wilco Moore comes from the very simple fact that the name William is common on both sides of my family and my last name is Cox. So I slapped those two together and came up with WilCo. This of course is the name of one of Jeff Tweedy's rock acts. To a church kid who didn't buy his first "secular" album until late in high school (U2's The Joshua Tree), names of indie rock bands seemed inherently cool. Oh, and then Moore is the town where I spent most of my childhood.
So there you go: Wilco Moore. I thought it was a good pen name should I ever need one and I decided to stick with it. Also, that created player on NBA Street Vol. 2 was a monster on the basketball court.