Why I’m Harper Lewis

The first thing you have to decide is whether or not you’re going use one, or are you brave enough (or have enough dead relatives) to use your real name?

I have way too many living kinfolk to just slap my moniker on my eruptions on the page, so I decided to use two—one for my “legitimate” work and another for my erotica (smut, porn, salacious stories, lascivious lit).

Great, I had to come up with two names. For the legit work, I wanted something meaningful to me that gives credence to my literary influences. Most people easily figure out part of the genesis of the first name: Harper obviously comes from Harper Lee, and, yes, To Kill a Mockingbird is one of my all-time favorite books (not saying how many I have, actually can’t, as I’ve never counted), but there’s more to it than that.

I read To Kill a Mockingbird for the first time in 8th grade. My English teacher also made us keep journals, and we read 1984, some of Katherine Anne Porter’s short stories, and we began reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, but somebody’s mom got her panties in a wad over the profanity, complained, and the books were taken from us. So, this is the teacher who got me started writing, introduced me to Harper Lee’s work (among others), and gave me my first experience with book banning. She was my pediatrician’s daughter-in-law. Her name? Kathy Harper.

But wait, there’s more. My undergraduate advisor and main creative writing mentor was also her professor, and when I took his classes, I realized that she taught us like he taught her, so Harper is homage to Harper Lee, Kathy Harper, and Wally Evans. Simon Lewis is the name of the professor I had my assistantship with in grad school at the College of Charleston. I was his editorial assistant for the literary magazine Illuminations, and he published two of my poems, one while I was in school, another after I graduated. I also took his 20th century British poetry survey.

So that’s how Dena Brown became Harper Lewis. Maybe one day I’ll reveal my other pseudonym and the story behind it.