One of the many reasons we love books is the opportunity they give to increase our empathy, compassion and knowledge through stories of lives far different than ours.
As a child, Terry Helwig moved from town to town with her parents and sisters from one oil field to another. Always hoping the latest move would be permanent, it was never long until her optimism ended and a new job beckoned. As a young girl, Terry and her sisters were left with grandparents and no explanation from their mother as to when she would return for them. Helwig became a mother to her younger sisters providing the comfort and consolation, so necessary as they grew.
She loved her mother but couldn’t understand why they had to live away from her or move so much when they were together. Determined to make the best of what life offered, she tried to accept their lifestyle as Normal. As Helwig matured, she questioned her mother’s decisions and learned what lengths she would go to procure the drugs she couldn’t seem to do without. What is it like never to put down roots? How did Terry come to both love and accept a parent who disappointed her time and time again? How did she go on to make the family she always dreamed of having?
A friend of novelist Sue Monk Kidd for many years, she credits her with helping her come to know she had a story all should read. Terry listened to Sue, and we have the beautiful heartbreaking memoir to read as the result.
If you love books about real people or want to spend time with a woman who has a fantastic story to tell, don’t miss our next show with the author of the fine work Moonlight On Linoleum available from bookshare and public libraries. Like many in adverse circumstances choose to, she has risen in triumph over difficult circumstances most never know. Join us as we speak with this magnificent lady on the next Books And Beyond.
Below you will find information about her and details about how you can attend this unforgettable show.
Terry Helwig began life in 1949 on a farm near Glenwood, Iowa. Her mother, only fifteen at the time, struggled with the rigors of motherhood, farm life, and marriage. Terry’s mother divorced when Terry was two and moved Terry and her younger sister to Colorado. Despite half a dozen daughters and almost as many marriages, Terry’s troubled mother never found contentment.
Terry’s stepfather, a loving and hard-working wildcatter, moved Terry and her sisters to numerous oil towns across the Southwest. By age eleven, Terry had moved ten times and penciled a fifteen-page novel The Lost City of Enchantment, igniting her life-long desire to become a writer.
In her twenties, Terry married her husband Jim of 42 years, lost her mother, and pursued writing as an assistant editor at a public radio and television station in New York State’s Capital Region. She later graduated Summa Cum Laude from Regis University in Denver, Colorado with a B.A. in Communications.
Ever the student, and compelled by her family dynamics to explore the realm of human motivation and consciousness, Terry studied transpersonal psychology at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado and later graduated with an MA in Counseling from the College of New Jersey.
While being room mom, team mom and sewing costumes for numerous recitals and plays for her daughter Mandy, Terry wrote, lectured and led workshops for women on personal growth and development. Terry’s writing has appeared in Spirituality and Health, Daily Guideposts and other publications.
Responding to 9/11, Terry created The Thread Project: One World, One Cloth, www.threadproject.com, a textile exhibition encouraging tolerance and compassionate community. As a result of moving so often in childhood, Terry believed people were really more alike than different. To foster community, she invited people worldwide, via the web, to send her a single thread, representing hope—however slim their thread of hope might be. She coined a motto of sorts: Some people say our world is hanging by a thread. I say—a thread is all we need.
Over the next five years, more than forty weavers, in fourteen countries, set up looms in their respective communities to weave tens of thousands of collected threads into tapestries that hung in the United Nations and St. Paul’s Chapel. Now, ten years later, Terry hopes to gift this fabric of humanity to an organization promoting peace. Terry also co-wrote a play about the project called The Thread Narratives, which debuted in Charleston, South Carolina.
The Thread Project exhibited near Ground Zero at St. Paul’s Chapel
For the five-year anniversary of 9/11in New York City
Terry now devotes herself fulltime to writing. Her coming-of-age memoir Moonlight on Linoleum is a luminous story about a first-born daughter taking her younger sisters under-wing and forging a lasting bond of sisterhood. The memoir portrays a turbulent family clinging to the thinnest threads of fortitude and determination, revealing not only the depths to which we can fall but also the heights to which we can rise.
Currently, Terry and her husband Jim divide their time between the coasts of Florida and South Carolina. Their daughter Mandy is an attorney in Washington, DC.
Unflinching in its portrayal, yet told with humor and compassion, Terry Helwig’s compelling memoir Moonlight on Linoleum explores a family’s inner and outer landscape of hope, despair and redemption. Growing up the oldest of six girls in the big-sky country of the American Southwest, Helwig describes her struggle to love and understand her troubled mother. Often left to care for the household and her younger sisters, Helwig forges an unbreakable bond with her sisters as the family moves from one oil town to another. Helwig’s coming-of-age memoir will make you laugh, cry and hunger for more.
Bonnie Blose, Host,
Books And Beyond,
E-Mail: bookmaven1@frontier.com
