Thanks! I tend to think my last name was a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy—whenever I wrote something half-decent, people would point at my last name and tell

Thanks! I tend to think my last name was a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy—whenever I wrote something half-decent, people would point at my last name and tell me I was supposed to be a writer. Never happened for anything else I knew how to do. However irrational that is, I’m sure it influenced my self-image to some extent. Then again, back when the name was first introduced, it probably didn’t refer to author in the modern sense, but to a person in the community who, unlike most, was literate (knew how to read and write).