About Terry

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: Time & Love.

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, responsible to the state for a facility and the people inside it. 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 Salt Lake City in 1976. Her uncle was sentenced to thirty years by a federal judge who was himself under investigation. Her aunt — a women's rights activist and legal strategist — was sentenced first, and fought the system from inside it, filing case law and winning the right to marry him while she was already serving her sentence at Purdy and he had not yet gone in. Then he did, and the two of them were held by different prison systems entirely: he in a federal penitentiary, she in a state institution. They wrote each other more than a thousand letters. 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.

For twelve years Terry dove into the records regarding her uncle and aunt. In those records she learned what a complete file looks like — and what it looks like when someone has decided a person was not worth writing down. She already knew that second one. She had seen it on charts.

Her work now examines both sides of institutional power: what happens when a system fails to protect someone who needs it, and what happens when a system is handed the power to punish.

Through The Docket, she uses public records, court decisions and original reporting to examine cases and institutions affecting children's safety. Through The Gap, a weekly series, she writes about children who fall into the space between what they need and what the system provides — real cases from Washington and North Idaho that should have been local news and weren't. Through The Advocate and the Pussytoe Fields, her first novel, she asks the question underneath all of it: what do we owe the people our systems were created to protect?

She is the author of Re-Imagined, Pen Pals, and the forthcoming The Advocate and the Pussytoe Fields. She lives in Spokane, Washington.