About

About Terry

Terry Marquardt writes about what happens to people inside systems built to protect them.

Terry Marquardt’s interest in difficult human stories did not begin with research. It began with her own.

She grew up in North Idaho, one of five children, in a log cabin where poverty sometimes meant no running water, no electricity, and not enough food. When Terry was twelve, her mother left the family, and her father became the constant in her life — the man she still describes as her rock.

Terry also survived childhood abuse, experiences that shaped decisions she would carry into adulthood, including placing her first child for adoption. That deeply personal chapter of her life became part of the story she later told in Re-Imagined.

She went on to graduate in 1992 from Coeur d’Alene’s first alternative high school and eventually raised two sons of her own. Through poverty, abuse, motherhood, adoption, loss, reinvention, and the ordinary difficulties of building a life, one idea became a kind of family philosophy:

Do Awkward Well.

Terry raised her sons with those words. To her, they mean that life will inevitably put us in painful, uncomfortable, frightening, and uncertain places. We may not get to choose the circumstances, but we can choose how we walk through them — and whether we allow them to define where we end up.

Terry spent twenty-seven years in healthcare. Eight of them were in pediatrics, working as a certified nursing assistant in the pediatric ICU at what is now Dayton Children’s Hospital in Ohio, and later at Sacred Heart Children’s Hospital in Spokane and Kootenai Health in Coeur d’Alene. She was also a licensed assisted living administrator in Idaho. She has seen institutional failure from both ends — from the bedside, where you watch it happen to someone, and from the office, where you are the one who has to document it.

Her uncle and aunt were arrested for armed bank robbery in 1976 and wrote each other more than a thousand letters from two different prison systems. Terry spent twelve years turning those letters, along with FBI files, court records and grand jury transcripts, into Pen Pals — the first book of The Gamble — An American Reckoning.

Her first novel, The Advocate and the Pussytoe Fields, asks the question underneath all of it: what do we owe the people our systems were created to protect? Through The Docket, she uses public records, court decisions and original reporting to examine cases and institutions affecting children’s safety.

She lives in Spokane, Washington.

Speaking

Terry is booking talks and interviews — on child protection and the gaps in it, on sentencing and incarceration, and on writing from the documentary record. Get in touch.