Books

Letters from East of Nowhere

For fans of The Glass Castle and Lit, comes award-winning author F. Kennerly Clay’s personal story, a hippie culture memoir about an unconventional, alcoholic upbringing.

“My father’s mugshots are strewn all over the internet…”

So begins this gritty and intimate memoir that unveils the unmistakable, indelible love between a woman and the father she knows almost entirely from a cache of letters sent from a lifetime on the road.

Conceived in San Francisco at the height of the counterculture movement, Kennerly Clay was born to parents who embodied the hippie spirit. From their first encounter at a student activism meeting, to protesting the Vietnam War, and lured west to embrace the Haight-Ashbury utopia of hard partying and rock n’ roll, they lived the full measure of the Sixties life. But as the hippie culture waned with the end of the Sixties, so did the bonds that held their small family together.

Letters from East of Nowhere is a deeply personal tale about the consequences of a life free of commitments against a backdrop of wandering, music, and overindulgence. It was the free-spirited lifestyle romanticized in Jack Kerouac’s 1957 novel On the Road that beckoned to Kennerly Clay’s father, which also led him to a lifetime of failed relationships, mishaps with the law, and a never-ending struggle with alcoholism. Aside from booze, his only constant was a passion for the written word, and throughout the years he sent letters, poetry, and expressions of his undying love for his children.

While Kennerly paints an earnest portrait of her father, at the heart of this story is a tale of inspiration and personal discovery, the uncovering of some of life’s more important moments that were lost in her childhood, and others newly found. It’s an unflinching reckoning with the wake that ripples through a family when one is gripped in the clutches of addiction.

But as addiction often begets itself from one generation to another, this father’s true gift was passed to his oldest daughter. Despite his wandering life and occasional forays through seedy worlds, he remained a talented and creative soul who often dreamed of writing his own great American novel. The letters he sent to family and friends along the way were often full of wit and wisdom, and a cultural perspective that only a life on the open road could provide. Now his daughter has embraced his love of the written word as well.

In the writing of Letters from East of Nowhere, Kennerly Clay has found her own voice, delivering a wonderfully honest reflection on life, on the passionate craziness of the Sixties, and on learning to love a father who would always choose alcohol over everything else.

What people are saying about Letters from East of Nowhere

“…characters so well-drawn we feel like we’re living through the experience with them.”⸺DENISE BARON, Ayurvedic practitioner and wellness expert, Wellness 360

“The author demonstrates that, no matter how destructive the effects of addiction may be, there is always hope for healing and renewal.”⸺ASHLEY B. COOK, M.Ed., LPC, LMHC, NCC, ABC Therapies, Mind & Life Empowerment

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Calling of Ancestors: Finding Forgotten Secrets in My DNA

A Kindle Single release

‌In Calling of Ancestors: Finding Forgotten Secrets in My DNA, author Kennerly Clay discovers through DNA testing more than one mystery about her genetic ancestry.

Genetic connections and genealogical research lead Kennerly on a fascinating quest to uncover forgotten family secrets in her paternal lineage. What gets revealed tells a different family story than the one handed down. The author soon finds herself confronting racism within her family while also exploring her own deep-seated biases at a time when much of the U.S. is trying to come to grips with the effects of racial injustice. In this insightful and powerful story of discovery, the author exposes her own limitations as she discovers the selfishness of white privilege in the process of unraveling a genetic mystery. Readers are left to reflect on the epigenetically, energetically, spiritually causal relationship between the ugly legacy of slavery⏤not only on those who were enslaved but also on those who enslaved them⏤and the generational effects of long-term racism, violence and abuse on its descendants to this day.

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