Also known as.....

It's funny how over the years I have been called by other than the name I was christened with. Of course my dad had a nickname for me, and which I am not going to reveal because I used it once in a piece of writing! However, the name I have mostly been called when people get my name wrong, is Helen. It has happened so many times I ignore it now. Maybe I should use this as my pen name!

The most extraordinary name I've been called is Barbara, and I have no idea why. It's not even close to Heather, which is my real name in case you are unsure. Maybe I reminded that person of a friend of theirs called Barbara. It irked me more than Helen. Of course, to my children, I'm just mum, though once when I was signing lots of Christmas cards I accidentally wrote Heather on my son's card, which he was quick to point out. At least it wasn't Helen!

Remembering names is hard. I find when I meet people names go in one ear and out of the other unless I use some method for remembering. Strangely, I have no trouble with men's names. That could be just because I meet so few of them (writing classes are predominantly female, and the Over 50's racquets class I attend is also predominately female), or maybe men interest me more than women! Then there is that moment when your mind goes blank and you cannot remember someone's name, especially when you go to introduce that person to someone else. I'm sure we've all been there.

When it comes to being published, the right name is very important. Once my name was mixed up with someone else whose poem had been published in the same magazine. This was put right in the next issue. These things do happen, yet they seem to happen to me rather a lot, or maybe I just have a complex about it now. When I was a lot younger, mid teens say, and desperately shy, I'd be overlooked in a shop queue. Perhaps I looked too young to be an adult and therefore not a customer. I thought of myself as invisible. I was short and easily lost in the heads of taller people.

You might wonder where this going, and perhaps I should get to the point. Firstly, I should say how excited I was about this. In December, I received an email from Writers' Forum to say I was the winner of their monthly poetry competition, on the theme of 'cure'. This was the biggest prize win of my writing life so far. My excitement was so great that I accidentally deleted the email and then couldn't find it in my junk/deleted folders. I had to telephone them and explain because they had asked for a head shot for the magazine. How embarrassing.

The February issue of Writers' Forum was published on 20th January. In it would be my poem. I got hold of a copy on the day, did a quick check in the shop and bought it. On the bus going home I went to the page and read my poem. How proud I felt. How excited. And then I looked down at the bio and they put name as....you guessed it....Helen! Thankfully, my correct name was against the poem, but oh, not Helen again. This is what prompted me to write this post. I saw the funny side of it, eventually.

In an office where I used to work, a new lady joined us. We called her Katrina because that's the name we heard. It wasn't until months later that she owned up and said that wasn't her name. We asked her why she hadn't said. She replied, 'because I liked the name.' 

All this is course fuel to the writer. These little nuggets creep into my stories, and actually I am a collector of names. I particularly like unusual names, and one or two I've made up. So there we have it.

Before I leave you, I'd like to draw your attention to another success this month. I have a poem published on the Visual Verse website, entitled Bath Time. I do have an author page on there, and you can view everything I have had published by them. They do have my right name, though you will have to look under the Archive tab and then H for Heather, not W for Walker. That's their system.

Until next time, this is Heather aka Helen signing off.