Terry Nichols is a retired National Park Service ranger who left her childhood home in Cincinnati, Ohio, to work in parks in the high desert and canyon country of the American Southwest. After thirty years of caring for and interpreting ancestral places, she began writing for children. Her award-winning debut fantasy, The Dreaded Cliff, stars a word-mangling, hopelessly lost packrat trying to get home as she faces self-doubt and dangers galore. Her essays have appeared in regional anthologies, and she shares her adventures traveling the world on her travel blog. Mother of two grown sons, she writes from her cozy straw bale home in northwest New Mexico, where she continues her love affair with packrats and endless skies.
Here’s a news story about me signing my debut novel, THE DREADED CLIFF, at Amy’s Bookstore in Farmington, New Mexico in 2021.
That’s the short version. In addition to this featured story about me as an author, here’s more:
I’m a wanderer. To places physical and imaginary. I play with how my thoughts find experiences in the physical world. Like the time I found perfection one early morning before the bullock cart races in India, amidst the teams of wiry men, lean bullocks, two-wheeled carts, fans and garbage, stray dogs, buzzing motorcycles, and a tea stall with customers trampling the colored powder mandala freshly laid at its dirt entrance. For a moment I was there, and I was everything and everything was perfect in that village in India. I like to write about those wanderings, and have published over one hundred posts. Please visit my travel blog site.
I like to think about stuff. Like the tarantula den near my house. She’s holed up in a perfect round tunnel, dipping into the earth, into the underworld. Sometimes the den entrance is woven over with white silk and then I know she’s home resting, perhaps waiting for a future suitor. Other times there’s no silk and I worry. Did a tarantula hawk get in there and do her in? Is she out on a stroll, hunting for a suitable bug to chew before she returns home to wait and wait and wait? Later, when her woven shield appears, I let out a sigh and know she’s safe. Does she ever wonder if the giant creature who peers into her hole every day will do her harm? I hope not. I tell her I’m glad she’s there and I hope she lives a long life.
I’ll take on big projects. Like building my strawbale studio. Three years, yessir, that’s how long it took. Longer, if I count the two years of planning. No experience in construction, but I convinced myself I could do it. I’ll never repeat that one. But then I wrote a novel—The Dreaded Cliff—about a packrat who loses her nest but discovers the true meaning of home and family. Fifteen years, yessir, from my first scribblings to acceptance by a publisher. The story is not long or complex. But I took a long time transferring it from images in my head to paper. And since that first manuscript, I’ve completed another, The Turquoise Bead, due out December 10, 2026, and yet a third which will probably never find a publisher. All intended for younger readers, but adults will enjoy them, too.
Creating is important. Doesn’t matter whether it’s a dumpling, an idea, a doodle, garden, tune, footprint, or a relationship with a person—creating is what it’s all about. Expanding, growing, traveling, seeking, exploring, rejoicing. The process—not the product—is where I thrive, where I find my joy.
Terry Nichols 