My working-class parents named me Pat-Louise Keuning. Patricia was too posh, Louise was my mother’s middle name and the hyphen solved the problem. Keuning was my father’s Dutch surname. That’s the story of the birth certificate. I never liked the hyphen or Louise, used Pat. When I started publishing poems, my college friend Don Stabile said I should write under Pat-Louise, no last name.
Stabile, wherever you are, it is my lifelong regret that I did not take your advice.
Road sign for a small town along the coast of Croatia, taken by Mike Thornton and Donna Altieri, 2011
Bio note:
Pat Keuning published her first poems and did her first readings in the 1960s. No one could pronounce “Keuning” and it was often misspelled. “Reading tonight: Pat Kuenig.” Pat Herrera placed poems in journals, although that first marriage lasted little over a year and she doesn’t like to talk about it. Pat K. Urioste wrote a Small Press Review column for a dozen years. Pat Urioste appeared in numerous literary magazines and her one-act play sold out in two productions. Patricia Keuning Urioste was the author of her first book of poems, Urioste having been her married name for the seventies. Ironically, the book’s publication coincided with the end of that marriage.
Chicano friends urged me to keep Urioste for the reputation it had established and the publications it might bring. Ethnic writers were starting to be hot. It was sweet of them: they’d adopted me, declared I wasn’t white anymore, pronounced me an honorary Chicana. But it made me uncomfortable. After the 1982 divorce I went to court to take my grandmother’s Slovak maiden name and became Patricia Dubrava Keuning. Couldn’t get myself to drop Keuning: I already felt guilty enough for leaving the family. It was Patricia Dubrava for the second book of poems, the book of translated stories, and everything I’ve published in the forty years since, including dozens of translations and 300 essays on my blog. It was Patricia Dubrava for my twenty-some years of teaching. The hyphen, Louise and Spanish surnames were long gone, but when I sign a check, it’s still Keuning. I regret that too.
The first name plagued me as well. When my stepson Rusty Urioste discovered my mother still called me “Patty” and learned about the Louise part of the name, I became “Patty-Lou.” That habit infected others, even beyond the Northside. As far away as Englewood, people started calling me Patty. “Pat,” I would say firmly, introducing myself. It had no effect.
When I worked at Chicano Humanities & Arts Council in the 1980s, director Carlos Martinez said, “in view of the emphasis on the chicanada around here, you’re now—” waving a loose cross over my head— “La Pat.” I entered an auditorium and a Mexican folklorico dancer shouted across hundreds of seats: “La Pat!” The entire Chicano audience turned to look at me, thinking, “what the hell; looks like a gringa to me.”
But the last name stuck. In 2007, when I was still teaching, I walked into the Ravi Shankar Paramount concert, heard, “Dubrava!” and turned to see a group of my writing students high in the balcony cheap seats, two of whom had skipped my class that very morning. Writers are often troublemakers. These days, when I hear “Ms. Dubrava!” on the street, I know I’m about to meet a thirty-something adult who sat in my classroom at fifteen.
If I’d taken Stabile’s advice, I would have avoided all this humiliation of names. If I’d had any sense of the importance of establishing an author identity. If I’d had any sense of establishing an identity. I am who I am now, a patchwork of personas past, names assumed and discarded. I’ve been Dubrava for forty years. Still, by my age, one has regrets: it may be less weighty than others, but this sack of names is one of mine.
Wonderful! I remember teasing you about being “The Woman of Many Names” – and abbreviating that to PKU during the early years. And I always loved “La Pat.” Terrific little memoir/essay. Thanks for both the memories and the smile this brought to me this morning.
Talk about your identity crisis! That one went on too long. Thanks, Kathleen. So glad it brought a smile.
“Bobby” sympathizes.
love the “sack of names.” My husband’s mother. a child immigrant from Russia, was a master at name-making: Leonard, Flora May, and Geraldine . . .we still laugh.
Ha! Again soooo relatable. I tried a lot on too. Debra, Debbi, Deedee, Deb. When I married, figured I’d drop the long “Rosenbaum” for the greatly shortened “Ely” but the end of the Rosenbaum line with the 4 girls in my family, prompted me to hyphenate (Rosenbaum-Ely). The signature became tooling for my small prints so I used DRE for awhile. It became way too confusing to have a longer hyphenated last name–was I under R or E, so I dropped the longer one. However, although shorter, NO ONE could pronounce “Ely”. Was it Elly, or E-lie? Thank god for the divorce and the supreme comfort of getting my original surname back. What was I thinking? Are artists the only ones who struggle with this?
I bet not, Deb, but the issue of reputation certainly means more to artists, if we’re trying to publish, sell art. It’s good to know I’m not alone in this!
To be a Jones is not without its burdens, but when I had the chance to change I stuck with it. Now I know why.
Andrea, so glad you could reinforce your choice with my experience. I love schadenfreude so much. 🙂
I like Pat Dubrava. It is my favorite.
Thanks, Agustín!
Mine, too!
I remember PKU, too! I think that’s how you were first introduced to be, at a Bloomsbury party in their first old house, and you unpacked the initials for me. Dubrava, though … that has that roadside sign quality that makes it memorable….
“Roadside sign quality” is a descriptor I’m keeping. Thanks, Joe.
Interesting piece! “Patty-Lou” – excuse me, but I can’t seem to associate that with you, your face, or who you are now. Patty-Lou has freckles and maybe a pony tail, and she wears saddle shoes and bobby sox. Or maybe that’s just me showing my age. Another observation, which has surely made you smile, too: “Rusty Urioste” nearly rhymes. Does that bother him, you think?
A confession: My first name isn’t Andrea. It’s Helen, which in my mind is an old woman’s name. Well, yeah. It’s one of those names you age into, ready or not. My mom named me for her father, Henry. I guess she soon realized that it was a dowdy name and could affect me psychologically. So I became Andrea, my real middle name, immediately shortened to Andy. My grandparents had a candy store, which led to the horrible nickname “Andy-Candy-Store.” Then, on my 9th birthday, a playmate wanted to give me a pendant with my monogram (HAG at the time), but her mom thought that it would be cruel and switched my initials around. Nobody in my family had ever given the monogram dilemma much thought. That was my first real foretaste of how many problems arise when one’s parents don’t consider the social consequences of an inauspicious name or laughable initials. (Remember the possibly apocryphal story about the Lear family’s daughter, Crystal Shanda Lear?). Anyway, for what it’s worth, I think Patricia Dubrava is a lovely name: sonorous, and with just a touch of the exotic.
Querida Andrea! This worked! You figured it out. A delightful comment. And Rusty’s “real” name is Roberto.