I've Kind of Found My Rhythm

For the longest time I felt an ending calling me. This past year I knew for sure it was time to stop publishing essays at Writing, Reading and Living. I began writing the blog in 2009 and feel deep roots. I plan to leave the site up for as long as free blogger exists, but the winds of change are sending me in new directions. I took a long break because I didn’t feel ready to move into a new writing space, but I also knew that if I didn’t begin publishing in a new space soon, it would make it harder to go back. You know the picture: vacation time, no writing deadlines, a great big field to wander in. At first it feels glorious and as the weeks stretch into months the lost days begin and the tormented writing soul begs to go home. 
 
In December 2025 I moved into a new writing space. Words Facing West (Substack)
 
I’m at home here at Earth and the Great Sea, and I plan to remain here. This online journal is my inner pond, my inner well, and the free-flowing place where writing makes a broth from my thoughts and experiences. 

But I don't share my polished essays here, it's not my goal for these pages. I view it the way my write-friend Patricia explains within her blogging pages. "This space isn't about performance or expectations. It is writing in its house clothes." 
 
It’s a cleaned up version of the raw, rough draft journal writings I scribble daily in my spiral note book. When I write in my journal often writing magic happens. Because almost all of the essays and memoirs I write and are accepted for publication in books and literary journals have grown into being from something I have written in my journal. 
 
Yet I don’t want to always be performing when I write. There is also a magic I’m able to tap into with journal writing that plants seeds. For me the journal writing wandering path leads to an inner quietude with a freedom to explore my real-life journey, and an open door for readers to ponder their own thoughts and mine.
 
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. 

University of Nebraska Press | Barns & Noble| Bookshop & IndieBound | Amazon

“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