At this moment, one of North Carolina’s most rapidly ascendant writers of fiction is probably very busy not writing. Terrence Holt—Dr. Terrence Holt, M.D. and Ph.D.—is likely attending to the inpatient geriatric ward at the University of North Carolina’s School of Medicine, teaching a class on the ethics of medicinal practice or administering to the elderly at a Triangle-area retirement home.
In the throes of these M.D.-prescribed preoccupations, Holt managed to recently publish In the Valley of the Kings, a collection of seven short stories and one novella. The book is the product of 30 years of almost-constant writing, interrupted only by his tenure in medical school at UNC.
“Just about the week I finished my residency, I started writing again,” Holt said. “Which was interesting, because I had never really expected I would. When I went to medical school, I thought I was done with all that. We sometimes entertain foolish ideas like this.”
The sudden attraction toward medicine came while Holt was a professor of literature at Rutgers University and the writer-in-residence at Swarthmore College. His tutelage in creative writing has some impressive credentials: he was the first fiction instructor of author Junot Diaz, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was Duke’s Class of 2013 Summer Reading.
“He saw who I might become before I saw it,” Diaz wrote in an e-mail. “Terrence was also a startling original writer, and, from the first story of his I read, I knew that this was the kind of writer I wanted to be. Apocalyptic, unflinching, true.”
Despite his obvious talent for both teaching and writing, Holt saw an essentiality in medicine that drew him in as he became older.
“A funny thing happens when you hit middle age: people you know start getting sick…. In the course of that, I met a couple of doctors who I thought were some of the most impressive people I’ve ever met,” Holt said. “They were in the position where they could make an enormous difference in people’s lives… and, clearly, [the doctors] were getting a lot out of being able to help people. I just couldn’t let that idea go.”
Holt followed through on the fascination and made a swift transition to medicine. Now, saddled with the honorable and burdensome mantles of both doctor and author—North Carolina a qualifier for both—Holt is cognizant of a shared territory that he embodies.
“Interpretation of literary text is a lot like diagnosis: someone comes in and tells you a story and you have to figure out what it means,” he said. “You’re just making reference to a different body of knowledge, but it’s still the same process.”
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