About Terry
‘dress-up night’
Terry was born in Boston Massachusetts and came of age in the proud city of Lowell 20 miles to the north. After graduating from Smith College, she spent most of her 20s teaching high school English in the Cambridge-adjacent city of Somerville, where, as she puts it, she ‘was permanently changed’ by her contact with the frank and intelligent questions of the young people she met there.
After having a few babies and putting in thousands of hours laundering their teensy outfits, it came to her that what she had always wanted to do was to communicate with people via the written word. The discipline of producing and distributing a weekly column led to her reaching the finals of a NASA-sponsored, peer-judged competition designed to send a journalist up on the Space Shuttle. Not long after the tragic explosion of the Shuttle Challenger, that initiative was quietly abandoned. Yet on some level Terry still considered herself ‘in training’ for such a high mission. Anyway, she still hopes to help people to a longer and more sublime view of their lives and accordingly, over the years, has produced five books, of both the pen-and-ink and the audio kind.
She has had the honor of being named both one of the Girls Scouts’ Leading Women and one of Smith College’s Alumnae in Residence, in both cases greatly enjoying the time spent with people close in age to those long-ago high school kids who first taught her what it meant to have a calling in life.
She and her husband live some scant few miles north of Boston in a big drafty old house that in every summer dreamily covers itself over in a Sleeping-Beauty’s-castle-like tangle of ivy.