I was raised on the move; new schools, strange faces, swap meets, and skipping town before the bills came due.
My dad worked construction, always had a new plan, a new company, a new dream to be relayed until he convinced my mom to try again. He shared his Omni magazines with me and we snuck away to watch the latest movies together; he told me my heritage in off-hand comments and misplaced references.
Home was the places I recognized when we returned. Home was great grandpa’s garden in the spring, and grandma’s house in time for canning the garden; home was stories and barbecues at Ocean Shores, and camping by the Yakima River so the men could go hunting.
Recently, I was asked to be a part of a panel on indigenous creation stories and myths at the world science fiction convention, I agreed thinking that I love creation mythos and study them for pleasure. So, I’m sitting on this panel with one other woman, she’s an experienced and locally-loved storyteller. She opens up telling a beautiful and insightful story about how basket weaving came to man. And I had the realization that the audience now expects me to tell them a story or two and not to discuss said stories. The microphone comes to me and I scan the room before saying: “Hi. I write literary zombie porn.”
The truth is a deflection, it pushes away the need to say “I do not hold my family stories except in fragments gleaned as a child. My creation story is three parts forgotten and two parts yet unwritten. I’ll know it when it finds me; I’ll tell it when I’m whole.”
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I can be found on Facebook as cheryceclayton and my webcomic page is: TalesfromtheZombieApocalypse
