Alli Lyon

"So, fun fact, May is actually short for Mabel and I spell it like the month, it's not as Asian as it sounds. Though I know how to write 'Mei Mariko insert-Japanese-translation-of-swan-here' in kanji of my choice. I don't speak Japanese, let alone really read it, but I've picked up bits because every now and then my mother manages to be nearly as embarrassing about investigating her own cultural heritage as a white person who watches a lot of anime and eats sushi and I collect information by osmosis. Dad is more consistently assimilated and a few generations more native and is why I have the English last name. They got divorced when I was really little, too little to remember, and Mom moved with me to Toronto from an eensy little town in B.C., but I visit Dad summers, they get along okay and everything. I got my first chair when I was, I want to say six, but I could be off by a year either direction. It was an autumn, nobody wanted me to try to toddle around on the ice another winter. And I have had a fairly conventional schooling history except that my mother teaches kindergarten so I kept calling my first grade teacher Mom out of habit even though he was a man. There is not a lot of exciting narrative structure to my life to plump up this story, I do a lot of reading mostly."