The Anthology That Spelled My Name Wrong
My first print appearance immortalized someone almost me.
There is a poet named Lena Hofmann with exactly one publication to her name, and I have been her since March.
My name is Lena Hoffmann. Two effs. It has been two effs on every library card, school register, boarding pass, and pharmacy prescription of my life. This detail is going to matter enormously, so hold onto it.
The acceptance came after two years of trying. Two years of entering monthly contests, two years of refreshing my inbox with the devotion of a lighthouse keeper, two years of writing poems about my grandmother's kitchen because that kitchen is where my entire understanding of love was manufactured, in a fog of dill and steam and arguments about salt. The poem the anthology took was called Sunday, Dumplings, and it was about family in the way that all my best work is: sideways, through food, because my family does not say the word love out loud but has said pass the plate ten thousand times and meant the same thing.
The anthology was a small annual called New Latitudes, edited by a man named Gerald Pryce who is, as far as I can tell, the last human being in publishing to conduct his entire correspondence by hand. The acceptance did not come by email. It came in a cream envelope with my address in fountain pen, and inside, on paper thick enough to shingle a roof, seven handwritten lines telling me that my poem had, and I quote, "the good weight of a full pot carried carefully to a table."
I photographed that letter fourteen times. Different angles, different light, once beside a coffee cup like an influencer, once flat on the floor because my hands were shaking too hard for anything artistic.
Then I told everyone. And I mean everyone. My mother, obviously, who ordered eight copies. My grandmother, who ordered five and does not read English poetry. My dental hygienist, mid-scrape, who was gracious about having no way to respond. A bus driver. The neighbor whose only prior conversation with me had been about recycling day. For six weeks I was unbearable, and I regret nothing.
The contributor copy arrived on a Tuesday in March. I did not open the package in the apartment. I waited... carried it to the kitchen table, made tea, treated the whole thing like a small ceremony, because you only get one first time in print and I wanted to remember mine.
I remember it, all right.
Table of contents. Page 47. Sunday, Dumplings. And underneath, in elegant small capitals, the author of my poem... LENA HOFMANN.
One f.
I want to be honest about what happened next, because the versions I told people at the time were dignified and this account should not be. I checked the spine, as if a different spelling might be hiding there. I checked the contributor notes in the back: also one f, consistent, committed.
I said "no, no, no" out loud to an empty kitchen.
Then I called my mother and announced, in the voice of a war widow, "They spelled my name wrong," and my mother, to her eternal credit, was silent for three full seconds before she started laughing, and then apologized, and then kept laughing.
I grieved that consonant for a week. It felt like the universe's pettiest possible prank: two years of trying, one moment of arrival, and the person who arrived was almost me.
Some stranger with my poem and ninety-eight percent of my name.
I drafted an email to Gerald, deleted it, and drafted a letter instead, because Gerald was a letter man and I wanted my wounded pride to arrive on paper. The letter was polite the way slammed doors are quiet. I did not send it right away... first, I had promised copies to my grandmother.
I took the tram to her flat that Saturday with five copies in a tote bag and an apology rehearsed. I warned her on the way up the stairs: Oma, they made a mistake, they got our name wrong, I'm sorry, I know it's the family name. She waved me quiet, sat me down, put on the reading glasses she wears on a chain, and opened to page 47.
She looked at it for a long time... too long. And she did not laugh.
"Who told them?" she said.
Told them what?
"That is our name," she said, tapping the page with one finger, right on the spot that had ruined my week. "One f. Hofmann. That is how my grandfather signed it in Regensburg. The officer at the port heard the name and wrote it his own way, with two, and my grandfather saw the paper and said nothing, because you did not correct a man with a stamp in 1923. We have been misspelled for a hundred years." She closed the book gently, like tucking something in. "This is the first thing to get it right."
I sat in my grandmother's kitchen, the original one, the dill-and-steam one, and felt the whole story flip over like a card.
The anthology did not misspell my name. It remembered a spelling the rest of the world had agreed to forget.
She told me things that afternoon I had never heard. That her grandfather kept his old signature for letters back home and the new one for everything official, a man with two names and one hand.
That in the biscuit tin where she keeps documents there is a photocopy of a ship manifest, and on it, in a clerk's confident cursive, the exact moment our name gained a letter it never asked for. She fetched the tin. We laid the manifest next to page 47. A century apart, the two spellings looked at each other across my grandmother's tablecloth.
I still wrote to Gerald, but it was a different letter by then. I told him the whole story and asked him, please, not to print an erratum. His reply came a week later, handwritten, of course, and contained a sentence I have since read aloud at two dinner parties: "In forty years of small press blunders, this is the first typographical error anyone has ever thanked me for. Most typos are the ghosts of poor proofreading. Yours turned out to be an ancestor."
People ask about my first publication story expecting triumph, the frame-it-and-weep moment, and I give them that, but mostly I tell them about a consonant. About how identity is a thing you think you own outright until a printing error shows you it was inherited with the seams still visible. I have spent hours since then reading profiles of writers nobody had heard yet, and I read the names slowly now, every letter, the way I wish the man with the stamp had. Behind every byline is a whole line of people who spelled it differently, or were spelled differently by someone else, and mostly nobody ever finds out.
I found out because a small anthology made a small mistake in my favor, a hundred years late.
When I signed my grandmother's copy, she watched me uncap the pen and said, "Sign it right." So I crossed nothing out. Under the printed name, one f, I signed it her grandfather's way, the Regensburg way, and she nodded once, slowly, like a border being redrawn back to where it belonged.
Page 47 is framed on my wall now, next to a photocopy of a ship manifest. Two spellings, one poem between them.
Somewhere between the two, all of us are spelled correctly.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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