Last night, I ran a workshop at Virginia Tech about how to write an effective personal statement, the essay about yourself that is often required when applying for graduate school, internships, research positions, and the like, and I began by talking about the critical importance of names and stories.
Names and stories are two fundamental ways that human beings stop the endless flux of experience and make any kind of sense out of it. Names and naming are thus profoundly important. So I tell the students, “If you have a ‘difficult’ name, like I do, insist that people pronounce it correctly. You may call me Paul, or you may call me Dr. H, or you may call me Dr. Heilker (it sounds like “wilder” or “milder” with an H and K inserted). But if you mispronounce Heilker, I am going to stop you, because if you give people permission to mispronounce your name, then you are giving them permission to disrespect pretty much everything else about you, too. What do you *care* to be called? This is the only question that matters, and it goes to the level of pronouns, of course.”
It has taken me a long time to embrace my name. I have always been embarrassed by it — or more accurately, embarrassed for and by the people who have so consistently mispronounced it my entire life, transposing the L and the K sounds to say “hike-ler” or adding a vowel between the L and the K to say “hi-lick-kerr,” even after I have corrected them several times. The worst/best mispronunciation of all time came from a substitute teacher in my 8th grade shop class who called me, and I quote, “Mr. Hellcat,” which is just awesome. Now, if I had been paying attention, I would have leapt on that moniker, and I would be sporting a pretty cool nickname.
What happened instead, though, was that I sought relief from the embarrassment and considered a long parade of other names I might use instead, stage names and pen names and aliases that might be cooler or at least easier for other people pronounce. Then Google came along, and I learned that I seem to be the only Paul Heilker on the planet at this time. So Paul Heilker it is, in all contexts, including my music. I have a responsibility here.