Cheryce Clayton

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 inciteful 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.”

http://zombpocalypse.cartoonistsleague.org/

I can be found on fb as cheryceclayton and my webcomic page is TalesfromtheZombieApocalypse