Terra Trevor: Room to Write

Room to Write

For the past ten years I’ve been living a minimalist lifestyle, but there was a time when my cluttered desk told a different story. Open shelves housed every book, magazine and literary journal that had published my work, hundreds of publications.

I had also saved everything I had ever loved or thought might prove useful in the future. My collections of cards, letters and photographs, made the room feel small, but I thought I needed them in order to be creative because they were linked with my identity.

Here I am in 1994, with my first Mac.

Then one morning I reached my limit and decided to change my ways. With less things surrounding me, I began to connect to the part of me that craves simplicity. A calm peaceful feeling took hold.

With less stuff everywhere my cluttered thoughts lifted, my writing grew more abundant and I felt rested at the end of my workday, renewed.

We Who Walk the Seven Ways is Terra Trevor’s memoir about seeking healing and finding belonging. After she endured a difficult loss, a circle of Native women elders embraced and guided Trevor (mixed-blood Cherokee, Lenape, Seneca, and German) through the seven cycles of life in Indigenous ways. Over three decades, these women lifted her from grief, instructed her in living, and showed her how to age from youth into beauty.

With tender honesty, Trevor explores how every ending is always a beginning. Her reflections on the deep power of women’s friendship, losing a child, reconciling complicated roots, and finding richness in every stage of life show that being an American Indian with a complex lineage is not about being part something, but about being part of something.

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“Terra Trevor’s memoir is a gentle invitation to journey with her across decades, an invitation to notice with her as she seeks healing and finds belonging. There were phrases and sentences I underlined, places where I wept, passages that will remain with me as they drew me to insights I’d previously struggled to name. I closed the final pages and knew that in reading this book, I had been the recipient of a generous and much-needed gift. While I can certainly finish a book in a day, I chose to move slowly through this one, letting each idea, each paragraph, each reflection gently spill over me, allowing the pages to alter me in some way.” —Patrice Gopo, author of Autumn Song: Essays on Absence

"Terra Trevor’s Pushing up the Sky is a revelation of the struggles and triumphs packed into the hyphens between Korean and Native American and American. From her, we learn that adoption can best be mutual, that the adoptive parent needs acculturation in the child’s ways. With unflinching honesty and unfailing love, Trevor details the risks and heartaches of taking in, the bittersweetness of letting go, and the everlasting bonds that grow between them all. With ‘Pushing up the Sky’, the ‘literature of adoption’ comes of age as literature, worthy of an honored place in the human story." —Robert Bensen, editor of Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education

Pushing up the Sky: A Memoir