I used to say I didn’t write because of my name: Michelle Hoppe.

Michelle Hoppe is a Los Angeles writer/actress. I’m an unemployed Florida English teacher/writer. She played the guidance counselor in a reversed Shakespearean comedy Ten Things I Hate about You. I played nun #45 in a school production of The Sound of Music. She is a pornographic novelist. I am a Mormon. Her website has a single red rose draped seductively across the opening of a blurry-paged novella and fine white print on a black screen irrelevantly warning away minors. I masked pride and fear, for pride is fear, behind the question, How could I ever make it away from that name?

But I now proclaim–irrelevantly, as I assume someone is reading this–that I do write, and there came a time when I had to submit my first cover letter. I’ve heard cover letters are legendarily archived when ridiculous. Phrases like, “My mother really loved this story, and she thinks you will too,” or “My writing group expressed extreme like, even love, for my work. I’ve sent you this same story three times. Please take me seriously” are kept for editor posterity. Cover letters are the art of selling oneself, the paper equivalent of an interview, so I don’t know what I was thinking when I submitted,

Dear Editor,

Bio: Someday I’d like to be published as M. R. H., as opposed to Michelle Renee Hoppe or Michelle Hoppe. M. R. Hoppe sounds a little too sci-fi or fantasy for what I’ve written. Michelle Hoppe is the name of the actress who played a dirty guidance counselor in Ten Things I Hate about You. She’s a dirty novelist in real life who publishes under my name (name strumpet!). Maybe someday I’ll get married and all my problems will be fixed. I’m asking these questions now because I have yet to be published. You could change that, wink wink. Now I feel like a strumpet.

Thank you for your consideration,

M.R.H.

The next day: panic. Aside from felonies and misdemeanors, there was absolutely nothing to be done. Two months later I received a reply.

Dear Michelle,

Thanks for submitting your work to . . .  Unfortunately, I can’t use it for our next issue.  I would, however, love to see more work in the future.

Thanks again,

Poetry Editor

P.S.  I was honestly much more drawn to the style and tone of your bio. Do you have any poems that are looser, like that?

By M.R.H.
Satellite Beach, FL

My Polish last name is ten letters long. My Midwestern family has always pronounced it “jake-uh-bow-ski,” stressing the first and third syllables. Naturally, to me, it has been a simple, four-syllable name, as easy to say as Oppenheimer or O’Shaughnessy. Yet for others it’s been one of “those” names, as odd as Lipizanner, or worse, Blagojevich.

People forced to pronounce my name for the first time often give up after the first two syllables. Sometimes they pretend to stutter, saying, “Jakka, uh, Jakku, uh?” as if trying to remember the lyrics to a James Brown song. Or they try to stare my name to verbal life from the roster or clipboard in their hand waiting until the owner of this jacked-up last name chimes in to save them. Then upon being told, “It’s jake-uh-bow-ski,” people smile, saying with false sweetness, “Oh, of course,” before continuing down the list toward their next victim, usually a kindred spirit of mine with one of “those” names from China, or worse, India.

In the sixth grade, my name spawned the utterly stupid insult: Jack-off-a-bow-ski. It was a poor botched insult with a verb smooshed in there. The moniker was, in fact, so dumb that the kids who called me that quit it the same week they started. Maybe because it was too hard to say? Or maybe because they knew that they had not struck upon anything hurtfully cool. They seemed to understand that when you jacked-up someone’s name the result needed to be a short wicked-sweet noun or adjective full of meanness, like calling Heather heifer or Bobby blobby. It made no sense to waste a lot of breath on, “Here comes that Polish dork Matt Jack-off-a-bow-ski” when you could just yell, “Hey, watch out for blobby.”

My first week in college a professor doing roll call called me Matthew “Yah-ku-bov-ski.” I replied, “Actually, sir, it’s Jake-uh-bow-ski.” He said, “Actually, it’s Ya-ku-bov-ski.” I laughed. He was right after all. Why had I been making my name easier to say all these years? His way was a lot more fun. And being a professor, he sure knew how to make it sound harder than it really was.

So now, I can be Matt Yahkubovski, and if I introduce myself thus, you know I’ve either been drinking, or I think you look sympathetic to Polish nationals, or both. However people say it, I’m now content with my name’s odd power, and I revel quietly in the jacked-up-ed-ness it brings to the party.

by Matthew Jakubowski
Philadelphia, PA

“Where is Corisa, short and Stoudt?” sang the counselor.

It was Summer Fun camp and I froze: mostly from the shock that until that moment no one besides me had thought of this mocking. It didn’t help that I was a Haole living in Hawaii which automatically made me not the shortest but definitely the largest student in the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, and at the time of this incident, 6th grade. I walked, head-down-compromising-smile, to my place in the morning line-up.

Stoudt was my dad’s last name (technically, my stepfather). It took 10 years for the school board to realize I had been living under a false identity. I remember it felt strange to be accused of this, as though we weren’t a family and had been lying. I had the choice of switching to my biological father’s name or having my present dad adopt me. No problem, dad said and he filed the paperwork. However, the other man involved refused to “give up” the children he had not seen for a decade.

“I’m changing my last name,” I told the boy I had a crush on – I don’t remember his name.

“What, are you getting married?”

I laughed and it felt good not to be a child bride only the product of divorce and remarriage.

Not much later my family moved to California. I was now in 8th grade shifting from one foot to the other in my polyester gym shorts and baggy white t-shirt outside the PE teacher’s office. Three Cholas walked by. The peaks of their bangs stood at least four inches high. I’d never seen anything like it. We didn’t have Cholas in Hawaii. They wore thick make-up on eyes and on lips and snug revealing jeans. Signs of a world I had yet to discover were tracked by the bruises on their necks. I was in awe.

“Corisa, what’s your last name?” the gym teacher asked trying to find me on the roster.

“Moreno.” The syllabus came out weakly.

The Cholas heard me. They stopped and had to ask, perhaps because of my poorly coiffed hair. “Mo-re-no. Are you Mexican?”

“My father’s Mexican,” I said. These are my people? I thought.

*

Amongst other things, it took studying Spanish and learning to dance Salsa for me to grow into my inner Latina, but really, I’ll always be a little Stoudt. The carnitas help with that.

by Corisa Moreno
Oakland, CA

BEINASH (pron: bay-nash) often mispronounced ‘buy-nash’, ‘bay-nish’ or ‘b’nash (rhymes with panache) sometimes butchered to ‘beenash’ or mocked as ‘danish’.

The name was originally Beinashovitz but the English spelling is tenuous because at the time of the name’s transfer into English from Yiddish it was hardly a comfortable circumstance of choice or demand on the part of the titleholder.

I’ve found online 16th century Polish tax records with the almost exact spelling which would make sense since my father’s family are from that part of the world, more or less. There are other signs along the way I’ve picked up that spark some recognition of possible connection: there’s an Austrian police chief who was the subject of an Egon Schiele painting named Beinisch, there’s an Israeli supreme court judge named Beinisch, a famous LA bakery named Benesh, a Czech Prime Minister named Benes (pron: Benesh). I’m not claiming relation to any of these luminaries merely an indication of original geographic and linguistic origin.

According to the Museum of the Jewish Diaspora in Tel Aviv the name was perhaps a generic name given to Yeshiva students ‘ ben yeshiva’ (son of the Yeshiva) …ben yish…benish…which I know my Father’s family were. If you break the name down into it’s phonetic Hebrew it translates as ‘ ben ish’ (son of man) which is as generic as one can get.

The reason for looking into the geographic origin of my family name was to discover if there actually is any meaning in it for me. Or was it just assigned at some point in time? Like the color blue was given the name blue. I was trying to understand what the name meant by where it came from and who else had it and once knowing this I could perhaps decide if it related personally to me. Well, I haven’t really cleared that up - it’s a name shared by Jews and non-Jews. There are Austrians and Poles and Czechs with some version of the name. And here I am a South African Jew living in America…so at best I can deduce that the name itself doesn’t have any metaphysical relation to me as a person…

All I know for sure, though, is that when my Grandfather got off the boat from Lithuania to South Africa in the mid 1920’s he lopped of the ‘ovitz’ and become Maurice Isaac Beinash and much later Zaida (Grandfather) Maurice, but that’s another story…

by Adam Beinash
Studio City, CA

It’s sort of a dorky name but as I’ve gotten older I’ve grown into loving it.  Still I can’t deny it’s let me down over the years, over and over, without a pang of remorse, pretty much the way Bill Clinton let Hillary down.  The one that comes to mind is when we were on a flight to Vancouver and I was sitting on the aisle, pretty far up, though not in the first class, and it just seemed to me that I was getting a lot of foot traffic brushing by me.  People coming up from behind me, then turning heel when they were a few feet past me, and invariably I saw them looking at me curiously, and then a look of disdain or whatever would cross their faces.  They would peer right at me and then they’d turn away as if from some tragedy.  This happened three or four times, then I thought to myself I was being paranoid.  To test my theory I unbuckled my seat belt and made as if to stretch, then started sauntering towards the restrooms at the rear of the plane.  Was it my imagination or were whole rows recoiling from me?

In Vancouver it all sorted itself out.  A writer I knew was also on the plane, and told her girlfriend she had spotted Kevin Killian way up in the front.  The girlfriend thought she’d said, “Kevin Kline.” There were a whole group of drunk girls on the plane and our flight turned into a game of Telephone as they whispered my name in one ear and out the other.  “Kevin Kline!” By the time the rumor hit Row 26, some had heard the name as Calvin Klein”—all of which explained the mass disappointment when they came sidling up to my seat and instead found not a star, nor a great designer, but instead just a guy with a name that sounds like something else.  I guess I’d feel chagrined too, so I can’t really blame them.

In a way it’s sort of like, when I was in school, I had a boyfriend of sorts who told me I looked like Neil Young—exactly like Neil Young—and he’d say it with such force I had no choice but to accept it as a compliment, but now I wonder.

by Kevin Killian
San Francisco, CA

Kids say, “Hey Craphouse”
I’d respond, “That’s juvenile”
“But that’s who we are”

by Albert Krathaus
San Francisco, CA