Terry Farish is the author of Either the Beginning or the End of the World, winner of the Maine Literary Award for young adult literature and a Boston Author’s Club finalist award. Her novel in verse The Good Braider is set in South Sudan and Portland, Maine. It was selected as an ALA Best Book for Young Adults and winner of the Lupine Award from the Maine Library Association. Farish wrote the picture book A Feast for Joseph in collaboration with South Sudanese musician and writer, OD Bonny, and illustrator Ken Daley, which is coming from Groundwood Books in 2021. She’s also the author of The Cat Who Liked Potato Soup, illustrated by Barry Root, which was a Bulletin for the Center of Children's Books Blue Ribbon Winner. This tale of a man and his cat ("who he liked but not so's you'd notice") was translated into Japanese by Haruki Murakami which has provoked the cat to travel far.
Farish has worked with Bhutanese-Nepali refugees to create a bilingual Nepali-English folktale, The Story of a Pumpkin by Hari Tiwari and Dal Rai. She’s currently collaborating with Bhutanese-Nepali colleagues on a new project. She's honored to have been in on the visionary stage of Kirsten Cappy’s I'm Your Neighbor Books to “build welcoming communities for New Arrivals and New Americans using children’s literature."
My first stories were about animals, possibly because I loved them and didn't live in a place where I could have animals. So I imagined them. I wrote about them until I got a dog named Clara, and now Clara herself is in the books.
Today, I really like doing writing workshops with kids, teens, and adults who are finding their own stories to tell I love collaborating with illustrators, writers, and in a classroom with everyone while we all inspire each other to create. Sometimes I don't remember a young writer's name but I always remember the place and the time and the stories they write.
Writing for me is deep immersion into what I don't know. It sometimes involves research over years until I put the research away and begin to write. I write to understand us in our small world.
Terry
Portsmouth, New Hampshire