The Endicott Studio was named after the street where it first came into being: Endicott Street, in the old "North End" of Boston. In its early days, the Endicott Studio was a physical place: a working studio in the Castignetti Arts Building, a 19th century warehouse close to the docks of Boston harbor. This workspace was used by Terri and other artists, including Sheila Berry, Anita Roy Dobbs, Elizabeth Roberts and Julia Smith. They held mythic art exhibitions there, discussion groups for women artists, and "salon" gatherings co-hosted with Ellen Kushner. The Armless Maiden, the Snow White, Blood Red series, and a number of other book projects began on Endicott Street.

In the 1990s, the physical studio closed its doors when Terri moved from Boston to England—but the Endicott Studio continued on as an arts organization, supporting collaborative projects of a mythic nature in the U.S. and U.K., including anthologies and other publications, art exhibitions, and reading series.

The Endicott Studio Web Site was launched in the autumn of 1997. Endicott West, an arts retreat in Tucson, Arizona, was created by Delia Sherman, Ellen Kushner, and Terri Windling in 2001. The Endicott Studio Journal of Mythic Arts debuted in the winter of 2003. Midori Snyder joined the Studio as Co–Director in 2004. Today, over forty mythic writers, artists, scholars and performers (from the U.S., U.K., and Canada) participate in our Studio.
 

Keeping the Endicott name after the organization moved away from Endicott Street was a way of staying connected to the ideals of its early years—when insisting on the relevance of mythic art was still an uphill battle compared to its broader acceptance today. In an odd bit of serendipity, we've since learned that Boston's Endicott Street was named after John Endicott, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony—and that he came from the same small village in southwest England where Terri now lives. Stranger still, her 400-year-old cottage there was once owned by the Endicott Family.

Like the Endicott family, the Studio that now bears their name is a transAtlantic one—a bridge between the myths and stories of the Old World and the New. Mythic art creates bridges of other kinds as well: between genres and artistic disciplines, between peoples of different cultures and colors, between women and men, between humankind and the world of nature. Myth can be an important tool for artists addressing contemporary issues of gender, class, cultural identity, social activism, and environmentalism—while at the same time it allows us to engage in rich conversations with mythic artists of the past, and of the future.

"The job of a storyteller is to speak the truth," writes the great children's book author Alan Garner. "But what we feel most deeply can't be spoken in words alone. At this level, only images connect. And here, story becomes symbol; symbol is myth. And myth is truth."