BOOKS AND MOVIES

Posted By CarrieK on September 10, 2009

Michelle at GalleySmith is hosting the Literary Road Trip:

The Literary Road Trip is a project in which bloggers are volunteering to showcase local authors. This showcase can be anything you want to make of it – book reviews, author interviews, giveaways – as long as you’re working with an author local to you.

Terry Davis is a novelist who was born and raised in Spokane, Washington. He is the author of Vision Quest, which John Irving called “the truest novel about growing up since ‘The Catcher in the Rye.’ ” Mr. Davis studied under Irving and some other pretty amazing writers. Aside from writing, he has coached wrestling and taught high school. He currently teaches in the Masters of Fine Arts program at Minnesota State University.

Vision Quest: Using high school wrestling as a metaphor for growing up, the book reveals how teenage protagonist Louden Swain deals with both his desire to win his weight division in the state championships and his growing love for Carla, an older girl who is temporarily stranded with Louden and his father when her car breaks down.

If Rock and Roll Were a Machine: Bert Bowden is an Everyteen caught poignantly in the throes of becoming himself and torn by the task of breaking away from his loving-but-confused parents. It is an old story made new once again in the roar of Harleys, the pulse-like throb of an R&B baseline, and the silence of adolescent solitude. The story teaches us once again that the pain of “coming of age” is the purchase price of mature joy.

For a complete list of his works and a more in-depth bio, visit Terry Davis’s web site.

I was fortunate to be able to interview Mr. Davis via e-mail. His answers are long, and he suggested that I edit them, but I found it all too interesting, so you get the whole thing:

MY JOURNEY AS A WRITER

I was an only child with a mom who was sick a lot and a dad who scared me. I had a bunch of friends, but I couldn’t spend as much time with them as I wanted, and I couldn’t get out in the world as much as I wanted. I wanted “…more life …,” as Roy Batty says in Blade Runner. And I found that more life in books. I read like crazy. Sports books were my favorite, but I’d run into a classic, like Of Mice and Men, and I’d read it and get an idea of Literature with a capital L. A lot of books that high culture said were good didn’t engage me – few of them had any characters like the people I knew, or were set in places like the places I knew. Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye, for example, seemed to me like a whiny little prick. I wrote an essay on the subject, “How About Some Sympathy for the Strong?,” that appeared on the back page of the early paperback editions of V.Q. So in my second year of college I began thinking about competing against this view of life with stories of my own; I wanted characters and settings – story worlds – like the world I knew.

This is related to the question of Eastern Washington State’s influence on me. I grew up lower middleclass, much of my time around poverty in a beautiful rural setting (along the upper Columbia a little south of the Canadian line. I spent a lot of my youth fishing the creeks around Colville, WA. I was an athlete all my life – not a good one, but a guy who loved to compete, especially against himself. Books written by people living in Manhatten or growing up in different American social and economic strata felt foreign to me. American Lit is way, way more … gawd, how to say it? … democratic or populist than it was when I was a boy. At least that’s how it seems to me; I wasn’t well enough educated to have real knowledge.

I also grew up with bi-polar disorder and have had it all my life, of course, since nobody gets over it. It’s possible that the effects of this mental illness influenced my writing more than anything else. Here’s an example: maybe the idea of me wanting to compete with other views of people, places, cultures, Life, wasn’t an intellectual decision at all, but the result of feelings of inferiority and despair caused by electro-chemical failures in my brain. I realize the irony here: I say above, how about some sympathy for the strong?, and then I say here, Oh, I’m a victim, a victim! We’re all victims of some things, of course, and this is something that laid me low. Thank good fortune for pharmaceuticals.

STUDYING UNDER JOHN IRVING

Irving came to teach the second year I was at the Iowa Writers Workshop. Famous writers teach there, of course, but they do little teaching; there’s not much traditional teaching to be done, for that matter. I had John Cheever, in his hard days with alcohol, as a teacher, too, and Frederick Exley; my gawd, and William Styron in his hard years of depression and alcoholism. I’d forgotten that. I can see those guys in my mind right now, and hear them. They were real giants in American Lit then, and I doubt many people under fifty know their names now.

We had two classes a term, and they’re the same two classes for the program’s eight semesters: a reading class, and a workshop class, where the teacher and your classmates critique your writing in deep detail. Irving told us valuable books to read, and showed us how to read them so we’d see and understand how the writer created meaning, suggestion and all the other effects, how he or she created by skill with craft the effects that seem like magic. And he read our work with care and spoke about it in specifics.

The most important effect Irving had on me was to be an example of a writer who wasn’t the artsy-fartsy, let’s-all-be-geniuses-together, smoke-and drink-ourselves-to-death cliché. He didn’t hang out downtown in the bars; he worked out, for gawd’s sake. He was normal, and he was also a good writer. He wasn’t famous yet, because Garp didn’t come out till two years later. “This is a regular guy,” I thought. “Maybe I have a chance to be a writer, too.”

RECOMMENDING YA BOOKS

This is pretty much impossible for me because I read so little of it. I read my friends Crutcher, Terry Trueman, Will Weaver, my classmate at Stanford, Becky Davis, my former wifey, Alex LaFaye, Barry Lyga, Sherman Alexie, whom I’ve only met. I read with real pleasure the novels of my graduate advisees.

It’s not that I don’t like a lot of YA books; I do; The Watsons Go to Birmingham is a good book. It’s that in the last trimester of my life I’m trying to make up for the huge empty spaces in my education. I read Biography, Science, History, and I try to read classic novels. I read a lot of books twice. The Great War and Modern Memory I just finished for the second time, and E.O Wilson’s Sociobiology. I’d like to go out of the world less ignorant than I came in, but it’s not looking good. Some wonderful YA novels I remember are The Silver Kiss and Hare’s Choice; I read Charlotte’s Web maybe three times a year.

THE WRITERS WHO HAD THE BIGGEST IMPACT ON MY LIFE AND WRITING?

It’s books, rather than writers. This is a tough one, because there are so many.

NONFICTION ON CRAFT: Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, J. Middleton Murry’s The Problem of Style, John Gardner’s Writing Fiction; Irving’s essay “Trying to Save Piggy Snead.”

FICTION FOR CRAFT: The Things They Carried, Love Medicine, The Lovely Bones (for point of view and a writer’s courage – along with Bastard Out of Carolina); John Barth’s story Lost in the Fun House; Garp.

Chaim Potok’s The Chosen is an absolute, absolute must-read in this category. It’s not about writers; it’s about all artists.

FICTION IN GENERAL: Charlotte’s Web, Of Mice and Men, John Gardner’s Grendel; The World According to Garp; Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita; Chekhov’s stories; some books in The Old Testament; James Lee Burke’s detective novels set in Louisiana; James Joyce’s story “The Dead.”

GENERAL NONFICTION: Chris Hedges’ War Is A Force that Gives Us Meaning; Lincoln’s Melancholy; The Souls of Black Folk; Sam Harris’s The End of Faith; Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene.

ONE BOOK EVERYONE SHOULD READ: Charlotte’s Web.

Thank you so much to Terry Davis for the interview. To visit other blogs participating in the Literary Road Trip, click on over to GalleySmith. Stay tuned: next Thursday I will be highlighting author Jennifer Bradbury.

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