The Writing Life: Santa Barbara Writers Conference

You can go home again. I just returned from the legendary Santa Barbara Writers Conference where I led a two-day creative nonfiction writing workshop. I lived in Santa Barbara for forty-three years and I have a long history with the Writers Conference. First as a conference attendee for many years, followed by more years on the Writers Conference volunteer staff. It was a lot of fun, and a lot of hard work. I enjoyed giving back. This conference raised me, and I’ve had the opportunity to be around decades of the best writing teachers and some of the best writers on the planet. Back in the 1990s Charles Schulz, Ray Bradbury and Alex Haley were often around. Authors Barnaby Conrad and Bill Downey, Santa Barbara Writers Conference founders and workshop leaders, were pivotal in teaching me to write. In my mind I can hear them today, reminding me, if you can write two tight pages, you can write three hundred. 

Did I mention that I am a terrible name-dropper? 
 
It's good to be old and have a river of memories running through me. Hint. I'm so old the white clapboard church next door to the hospital where I was born was moved to Knott's Berry Farm. Really, I'm telling the truth. Or at least it was at Knott’s Berry Farm for many decades. 
 
But kidding aside, I believe it’s my job to give away all of the writing knowledge I’ve received over the years. Within this seamless web of life one thing, I know for certain is that I can only teach and share the writing lessons I’ve been given. 
 
For every success we have I believe it’s important to remember how we got there. I wouldn’t have been able to accomplish all that I have without the guidance from good people who gave their time to me, mentoring, shepherding and guiding me. I owe much gratitude to my literary elders who showed me the way and taught me to hold the door open, give back and help others where I can. 
 
Last year soon after my new book, We Who Walk the Seven Ways, came out, I was invited to be on the memoir panel at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference, and this year I had the honor of being invited to teach writing workshops. 
 
This past year has been a wild and tender full circle for me. My new book was released soon after my dad was placed on hospice, and days later he died. Then my close friend who is a main character in my book, died. She was 85. Weeks later I presented on the memoir panel at the conference, and just when I was finally able to catch my breath and began to enjoy publishing success, my sister-in-law died suddenly. 
 
Life is beautiful. Life is short. Love deeply and often. It’s not about the distance we travel upon this good earth, it’s only about the depth. 
 
Today I celebrate We Who Walk the Seven Ways. While writing the book I had intimate chats, wandering back over time with Marie, Ann, Mary Lou and Irene. Dancing with Irene long after the moon was full, wearing moccasins beaded in colors of sunrise, clouds and blue skies, her buckskin dress swaying. Irene danced the powwow competitions, Women’s Buckskin style, Northern, in the Golden Age category. At seventy-five with her tight jeans, blue-black hair and flirty personality, Irene reminded me so much of my aunt Jo, I had to keep reminding myself that she wasn’t my aunt Josephine. 
 
I honor and give thanks for these women in my life, the ones with the grandmother faces and flying clouds of white hair, walking the seven ways. I rejoice at how they made me laugh, and told me the truth even when it was hard for me to listen. Within the pages of my new book, I have brought them all back, made them come alive again. The women who over three decades, lifted me from grief, instructed me in living, and showed me how to age from youth into beauty, and to grow old in a beautiful way. 
 
University of Nebraska Press
Copyright Terra Trevor 2015-2026
Theme:
When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner’s pick, a wood-carver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year. —Annie Dillard


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