T F Gray

Teri Gray grew up in the Jersey 'burbs, twenty miles from Times Square, in a town too small to have a traffic light, wandering the forest, fantasizing about people living in holes in the ground, long after the other kids her age had outgrown that sort of childish nonsense.

She came to writing like most everything else in her life. High school newspaper editor-in-chief followed by a degree in art ed, followed by a stint as editor of a small publication in Honolulu, in addition to a wide assortment of jobs ranging from restaurant hostess to bartender to field interviewer to postmistress relief to banking to her personal favorite, communications director of the Newark Food Co-op.

Along the way, wedged between work, raising three children, and the occasional bout of illness, she wrote. Eventually, she found out about the existence of critique groups and started actually learning how to write. She’s not an example of the breakthrough novelist. If anything, she’s an example of the motto, Persistence Pays. The child who was a toddler when she started writing Corwin’s Chronicle is now pushing thirty.

She is a facilitator with the Alternatives to Violence Project, (www.avpusa.org) has worked with the AVP program at James T. Vaughn Correctional Center, and blogs about Corwin-related matters at www.tfgray.com and about gardening at www. suburbutopia.com

When Teri was one year old, her parents were schnookered into buying a set of encyclopedias, which came with a set of The Junior Classics. She fell in love with ancient myth: Greco-Roman, Norse, and Celtic, which, unlike encyclopedias, never become outdated. Not surprisingly, she fell head over heels in love with the work of JRR Tolkien and Ursula Le Guinn and started writing stories of her own. She didn’t do much in the way of marketing her work, being unaware that individualized rejection notes were actually supposed to be encouraging. Manuscripts went into a steamer trunk while she worked at various jobs to support her family.

In 2005, she met George Scithers, then editor of Weird Tales, at PhilCon. Even though the editors on the critique panel had thrown up all over her submission, he invited her to read slush for the venerable magazine. In that way, she discovered the work of Oregon writer Scott William Carter, who, after she had followed her day job across the country to Oregon, connected her to The Wordos critique group, the Oregon Writers Colony, and teacher Eric Witchey. With their generous help, support, and occasional head-thumping, she began to learn the craft.

Now, with the children grown, and having retired, she’s turning her attention to that pile of manuscripts.