I’m not ashamed to admit it. If there is ever a choice to be made with my art, I will always lean towards the pretentious option.
(You can tell this is true because I just used the phrase “my art” in the sentence above.)
So while I create under a pseudonym, strictly speaking I have always considered it a heteronym in the style of Fernando Pessoa – not just a fake name, but an alternative personality which releases me from the constraints of my otherwise mundane life and grants me the freedom to take my fiction in weird and experimental directions.
Is this particular heteronym – A Arbor – radically different to who I am “IRL”?
Honestly, no, not especially. There’s no deep well of backstory to draw from. But writing under an assumed name is liberating all the same.
I have zero expectation of ever being able to make a living from my writing – so it’s important to me that I can separate my creative writing from my day job. (Not to mention that I also have some very literal-minded relatives who… well, the prospect of my fiction being attributable to me and then spending the rest of my life being grilled on precisely who this character or that character is really based on, you know really… is pretty unbearable.) The privilege of never having to even consider explaining my odd little tales to any colleague or family member – unless I consciously choose to do so of course – is a very practical form of artistic liberation.
A Arbor is not the first name I have adopted for writing, and it probably won’t be the last.
But I like it. It has an awkwardness about it. A sort of anti-Cellar Door disharmony which reflects its origins in my fiction.
One of my novels, The Disasters of War, which may or may not see the light of day at some point in the future, stars an anti-heroine who assumes a different identity every year. She does this in order to re-enter her first year of university, over and over again – and surely we can all relate to both the desire to relive our youth and the inevitability of, one day, looking absolutely ridiculous in doing so.
When we first meet her – and we never find out how long this scam’s been going on for – her adopted name for that particular year is Ann Arbor.
It’s a name I’ve always loved. One woman’s name, incongruously applied to a city of 100,000+ people. In fact, the origin of the name is a tribute to two women, both called Ann – the wives of two Yankee speculators who bought up Michigan land to develop – and the abundant oak trees of the plot they purchased. But there’s so much more it evokes for me too. The MC5. The Stooges. The University Press. The Wolverines. (I’ve never even been.)
Many years ago now, I submitted a poem to Five Dials magazine on a whim. It was a concrete piece, inspired by the US legal system. Unexpectedly, they wanted to publish it, so I used the name of my favourite character from the novel I was working on as my pen name – Ann Arbor.
Then they asked me for a bio, which I also submitted in that weird, antiseptic third-person language, no less weird because I made most of it up. But when it was published, someone had changed my bio to include ‘she’ and ‘her’ at various points throughout, which somehow came as a surprise to me because I’m an idiot.
As well as an acute awareness of my own stupidity, I was left with a wider sense of unease – I genuinely hadn’t been pretending to be writing as a woman, but it might have seemed like I was, which felt like a transgression. And that was definitely no one’s fault but my own.
But of course, there was also concentric circularity in all of this. I had adopted a city name, partly named after two women, to use for a fictional woman, living under an assumed name. Then I had used it myself – as a placeholder to submit something pseudonymously – which was translated back into a woman’s name again via some amended pronouns.
So I never used Ann Arbor again. But when I needed a new name, many years later, I came back to it, revising it to A Arbor instead. Which I think is better, because it’s wrong. You can have an arbor (or even a harbor), but you can’t have a arbor. It’s awkward right from the jump. The stress is baked in.
For me (which reveals my failure in adopting Pessoa’s process), using a heteronym isn’t really about becoming anyone else, it’s just about not being me. For a few fleeting moments at least.
I’m a white male British author, from a working-class background, even if none of that is immediately apparent from the name A Arbor. I’m not trying to trick anyone into publishing me, and my “true identity” isn’t a secret from anyone wanting to work with me on publishing my work. But even so, I do like having a name which obscures identity. A name which doesn’t necessarily add any pre-determined flavour to the fiction. AA is about as bland as it gets1.
The first two bands I ever fell truly, madly, obsessively in love with – I won’t age myself by naming them here – were mysterious. And there was no doubt (even to me at the time) that the mystery fed the obsession. I read liner notes which may or may not have been works of fiction. I pored over promo photos which may or may not have been the band, but could just have easily been their friends or models or complete strangers posed for show (in some cases, I later found out, that really was the case). The impossibility of definitively pinning down the identities of these two bands somehow became an integral part of my enjoyment of their music. It forced the music to be judged on its own terms. It made the fiction in the lyrics much less fictional. The music was the persona, which was also the music, which was also…
An alternative inspiration is Fargo. The Coen Brothers famously started their movie with the following text:
This is a true story. The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987. At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.
But it wasn’t a true story. And when they were called out on it, they replied that it was a movie “in the genre of a true story”, because you don’t need to have a true story to make a true story movie.
I don’t know how many books (if indeed any) I will get to publish in the future, but I want each of them to be a distinct artefact in their own right. Don’t expect Acknowledgments or Prefaces or Introductions or End Notes or whatever else to be any more sincere than the fiction in the middle. That’s all part of the fun. (And if you somehow found this page, you’re in on the secret now too. Don’t tell anyone.)
Does any of that make sense? I’m not sure. Reading it all back it seems fit to burst from all the contradictions. But that’s it for now, from me, A Arbor.
This heteronym will persist, until it persists no longer.
A ARBOR, JUNE 2021
- Interestingly enough, and something which I only noticed some months after writing this post, one of Pessoa’s heteronyms was one “A. A. Crosse”, described as an “author and puzzle solver”.
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