John August: Hello. My name is John August. August is just like the month.

August is not my original last name. My original last name was German. It was spelled M-E-I-S-E. My family pronounce it Meise, but everyone always pronounced it different ways. So after college, when I decided I wanted to be a writer, I thought, "You know what? I don't want people mispronouncing my name for the rest of my life." So I decided to take my dad's middle name as my last name, and that was August. But there's still an echo of my original last name in the Arlo Finch books. In German, Meise, or Meise, is a small little bird. So when I was thinking of the title character for the Arlo Finch series, I wanted him to have a name that reflected that same kind of idea. So the closest thing to a meise in English is finch. So that's how I got the name Arlo Finch. It's close to my old original last name of Meise.