Varese, Apollinaire, Ezra Pound, Leger, Gleizes, Severini, Villon, Duchamp, Duchamp-Villon, Marie Laurencin, Cocteau and many others were to me household names in the literal sense - names of familiar figures around the house.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
My thought was I should try to stick with names that people may recognize like Robert Johnson, Son House, and Hoagy Carmichael, so if somebody cared to research, they would find a wealth of material.
It's Frederick Dierks Bentley, but my whole family goes by their middle name - my sister, my brother. So from day one, I've always been called Dierks.
I make up names for people all the time - it's part of writing. Very often, the name comes with the character, along with of a sense of who they are and what they do.
I'm a big fan of the poet Mary Jo Salter, and although she doesn't need to be discovered at all - she's widely admired and anthologized and extremely accomplished - I wish she were a household name.
Sarfati. That's my real last name. I don't use it a lot because I got 'Lea So-fatty,' 'Lea So-farty' at school.
All British people have plain names, and that works pretty well over there.
I definitely look up to Veronica Roth, Suzanne Collins, and J.K. Rowling.
Names aren't just coathooks, they're coats. They're the first thing anyone knows about you.
Johnny Mercer was my father's best friend and became mine as well. And Harold Arlen, whom I would call Uncle Harry, and Harry Warren: those were ones who I really became close to.
I was named after my two uncles. Roger Lee and Richard Allen. They simply changed the spelling to Leigh-Allyn to make it more feminine.