Terry Davis - His Own Vision

Interview with English faculty member Terry Davis, author of Vision Quest

Citation for this article: Munger, Guy. "Novelist has his own vision," Courier-Times, Roxboro, NC, November 8, 1979.

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Terry Davis is yet another novelist who's worrying about going home again.

Only Davis, author of the novel "Vision Quest," really does want to go home, to his native Pacific Northwest, the Spokane, Wash., area.

Davis is now in his fourth year at East Carolina University, where he teaches one undergraduate course and two graduate courses in writing.

In a telephone interview last week, he said, "I'm sitting at the kitchen table writing job resumes. I want to go home. I haven't been home since I was 18 years old."

It's not that he doesn’t like North Carolina. Of his boss, the chairman of the ECU English Department, Davis said, "If I had to pick another father, it would be Erwin Hester . . . When I was hunting for a job, he was the only one in this country who responded to my letters -- and I wrote 50 of them."

But Davis is used to waiting. "Vision Quest," his first novel, was on the market a discouraging five years before Viking Press picked it up.

Currently, Davis is working on a second novel, tentatively titled, "Mysterious Ways."

"It will be more traditionally serious," he said. "I'm trying to grow up a little bit in terms of style. It's pretty much the story of what would happen to old Job if he were alive today.

"I've got about half of it written and the ending is done. I've just got to connect them."

WANDERER -- Since leaving Spokane, Davis has studied at Eastern Washington State College, the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop and Stanford University, where he was awarded a Wallace Stegner Literary Fellowship.

"Vision Quest" was written partly in Iowa, partly in California and partly in Brazil, where Davis taught in an American school, and finished up at his family's cabin in northern Washington.

His experience as a high school teacher supplied much of the material for "Vision Quest," the story of a young man's efforts to grow up.

"The young people of the '70s were more sophisticated," Davis said. "They still had their problems but they were trying to go out to meet them."

"Vision Quest" stops just before the crucial wrestling match between protagonist Louden Swain, and a crosstown rival.

"To me, the ending is tied to the theme that ultimately we all lose in this life," Davis said. "None of us is tough enough to beat the tree that falls on us. But it doesn't mean you're a loser. I wanted to show what a person who wins in this life is like, one who lights to the very end."

Davis also acknowledged that some had criticized his work as devoid of the violence and tragedy of life: "Somebody at Stanford said I could have covered the Manson murders and made it sound like "The House at Pooh Corner."

And he's by no means ready to give up teaching: "I need that contact with people."