After the ball dropped on New Year’s Eve 2018, I determined that I would finally launch into writing the book based on letters my father had written to me and my siblings over the years. I didn’t know what it would be called and I didn’t know how to put it together. I just knew it suddenly had to be written.

As I plunged the depths of memory and soul to reflect on life with my father, I was simultaneously diving into 23andme and Ancestry to investigate the unlikely DNA result that came back: I was 1.6% Nigerian.

Multiple stories began to unfold simultaneously and at times so overwhelmingly, in an accelerated way, I realized there was a story within a story. The first one was published as a Kindle Single called Calling of Ancestors: Finding Forgotten Secrets in My DNA.

My memoir about my father Letters from East of Nowhere: Daddy’s Words to Live, Drink & Die By can now be ordered on Amazon. Turns out it’s not only based on the letters I had, but letters my father had written my mother between 1965 and 1978, which I never knew existed and have since reshaped the narrative I had scripted of my early life.

​- Kennerly Clay