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Mt. Juliet basketball great, MTSU Hall of Famer and Dallas Wings forward Alysha Clark (left) has released her first-ever children\u2019s book, Paw Paw\u2019s Playlist. The book honors her late father, Duane, on what would have been his 77th birthday. Also pictured: Clark\u2019s niece, Adalina. SUBMITTED<\/p>\n
Mt. Juliet basketball great, MTSU Hall of Famer and Dallas Wings forward Alysha Clark is enjoying one of the more satisfying ventures of her 13-year professional career.<\/p>\n
Authorship.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Clark, the three-time WNBA champion and former TSSAA Miss Basketball winner, is celebrating the release of her first children\u2019s book, Paw Paw\u2019s Playlist.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Together with co-author Kiara Marsh, a freelance writer and the wife of Chicago Sky head coach Tyler Marsh, Clark released the book in honor of what would have been her father\u2019s 77th birthday.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It\u2019s inspired by Clark watching her nieces and nephews navigate the challenging conversations surrounding grief in the aftermath of her father, Duane Clark\u2019s, death, while offering comfort, hope and connection.<\/p>\n
Duane died in September 2022 at the age of 73. Alysha dedicated her third WNBA championship to her father the following summer while playing for Becky Hammon and the Las Vegas Aces.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Clark was named the WNBA\u2019s Sixth Player of the Year.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cHonestly the instinct to want to write started after my niece just asked, \u2018Auntie, Paw Paw is in the sky, right?\u2019\u201d Clark said. \u201cAnd that moment, from that point on, it just stuck with me. It had been a year and a half since we lost my dad, and that was the first time that the kids mentioned anything resembling grief.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThat was the first time they talked about it, and from that moment on it was just sitting on my heart over and over again.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Alysha Clark\u2019s first-ever children\u2019s book, Paw Paw\u2019s Playlist, is currently available for purchase on Amazon and Ingram Spark. SUBMITTED <\/p>\n
Clark recalled sitting on an airplane with Kiara when her thoughts of a possible book came to life. Marsh, checking in with Clark, asked what dreams she would like to accomplish in the future outside of basketball.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI just told her about that moment, and how ever since then I\u2019ve just been saying how cool it would be to honor my dad\u2019s legacy with a children\u2019s book on grief through love,\u201d Clark said. \u201cGrief is a heavy topic, such a big topic, and you don\u2019t think it affects kids in the same way \u2013 and that moment for me personally was like, \u2018No, it is their little brains processing that Paw Paw is no longer here.\u2019\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201c(Kiara) was like, \u2018I\u2019ll be your accountability partner,\u2019 and she told me to just start writing. She, then, was literally where the push came from. Simply from a conversation with a dear friend that just happened to be checking on me on our flight.\u201d<\/p>\n
Marsh bonded with Clark over the premise, having recently lost her grandmother. It allowed them to \u201cping-pong\u201d ideas off each other about conversations they had in the aftermath with young children.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI thought it was an incredible concept to take this really deep subject matter and flip it, and say \u2018Here\u2019s how we\u2019re going to explain this to you in a way that makes sense,\u2019\u201d Marsh said. \u201cIn a way that you can carry it for the rest of your life and really carry it into adulthood.\u201d<\/p>\n
Clark and Marsh concluded that loved ones leave bits and pieces of themselves to remember themselves by when narrowing down a story idea.<\/p>\n
For Clark, it was her father\u2019s avid love for music and the connection it brought to their entire family. That helped seal the story\u2019s title.<\/p>\n
The book, illustrated by Beth Snider, centers around a main character, Elijah, who turns to his Grandma Jan to navigate the death of his Paw Paw. With Grandma Jan\u2019s guidance, Elijah learns to feel close to his Paw Paw again through \u201chis life\u2019s playlist and memories he left behind.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBeing home and seeing all the memories just kind of helped me bring back all the positive things and positive moments that we shared and kind of allowed me to lean into the way people described him,\u201d Clark said of her dad. \u201cEven with my nephew, that was like his best friend, and being able to be around all those people who knew and loved him really helped me bring words to the pages.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s still hard for me to go to my parents\u2019 house because there\u2019s just such an emptiness there when you go. In the beginning, I was trying to mask that, but then I was like, \u2018No, I want to be able to feel that.\u2019\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt just allowed me to bask in those memories, and that kind of played into our whole theme that our loved ones leave little pieces of them behind. My dad left a little bit of him behind, and everyone in Mt. Juliet got to experience him.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Mt. Juliet basketball great, MTSU Hall of Famer and three-time WNBA champion Alysha Clark. SUBMITTED \t\t\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mt. Juliet basketball great, MTSU Hall of Famer and Dallas Wings forward Alysha Clark (left) has released her…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":738948,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73],"tags":[99,434],"class_list":["post-738947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wnba","tag-sports","tag-wnba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/738947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=738947"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/738947\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/738948"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=738947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=738947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=738947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}