Bill Torgerson

My sister Anne, daughter Charlotte and I all answered The Longreads Questionnaire questions and discussed the answers by writers Anne Lamott and Neal Allen. If you’d like to answer any of the questions you see listed below, we’d love to hear your responses in the comments to this post.

The Longreads questions are below with Bill’s responses. Anne and Charlotte share their responses on the podcast episode. We’d love for you to answer some of them in the comments section below!

1. Where did you grow up?

• Front yard on Hillcrest Drive in Logansport, the woods outside of Twelve Mile Indiana, Winamac town park, the pool

2. What places feel like home?

• The university lawns / quads at St. John’s University and Appalachian State, the Valle Crucis Park, the aux gym at Watauga High School, driving the team bus, sitting down by our creek watching our dog explore

3. Other than family members, who or what has shaped you the most?

• Fictional characters such as Lloyd Dobler; writers such as CS Lewis, Nick Hornby, and Doug Lemov; teachers like Kevin Zupin, Joe Bentz, Judy Whitis, Sam Watson, Lil Brannon, and Allen Gee. Countless coaches like Bob Knight and Phil Jackson.

4. What is your favorite time of day?

• Morning coffee with Megan, sitting down to the desk fresh, before sleepiness sets in, right after the workout

5. What are you really good at?

• The whole process of teaching from the drive to learn the material to organizing how it will be shared, to energizing the process of sharing and learning, to circling back to help it stick

6. What’s the best gift you’ve ever received?

• I’ve got a customized picture frame that starts off Dear Dad. It ends with We love you, Charlotte and Izzy. It’s got a picture of Charlotte and Izzy in their middle school shooting shirts in the Watauga gymnasium.

7. Describe your favorite meal.

• Megan makes chicken nuggets and horizontally sliced fried potatoes. I gotta say a recent meal at Dan’l Boone Inn in Boone could be way up there.

8. Sound or silence? (And if sound, what sound?)

• I want silence when I’m working. The sound of running water would be next, like when I’m sitting down by the creek.

9. Where do you do your best thinking?

• At my desk in my office usually accompanied by scratching notes and drawing arrows and circles in Notability on my iPad or a piece of paper.

10. What journey–physical, creative, intellectual, or otherwise–has meant the most to you?

1. Emotional of letting people, especially my dad, be themselves
2. Physical: the marathon
3. creative: The indie film The Mushroom Hunter. That seemed harder than a book. (Savannah Film Festival)
4. Intellectual: tenure at St. John’s, especially the academic publishing that came with it in publications such as College Composition and Communication
5. I once promised myself I would never get married again. The journey to promise to share my life with Megan means a lot.

11. Where do you like to read?

• In bed, in my office chair with my feet on a footrest

12. What’s the last rabbit hole you disappeared into?

• Looking for a home for about 4 months. Last day starting with 138, driving by 15 to narrow the list down to 7. And that was just the last 3 days of it.
• I do that kind of thing looking for a job too

13. Name three publications you enjoy reading these days.

• The New York Times. The Atlantic and I’m looking for a third. Maybe its Longreads!

14. What’s one longread that you can’t stop thinking about?

• Shadow Boxing: Lessons About Life, Death, and Writing, from Rocky by Jeremy Collins.

15. What piece of nonfiction are you most proud of writing?

• How Christopher Mello Sows Peace and Community in his West Asheville Garden in MountainX

16. What’s your most reliable way to get creatively unstuck?

• Allow Lamott’s “Shitty First Draft.” Butt in chair. Read.

17. Who’s a writer you turn to when you need some inspiration?

• For life, Lamott.
• For voice, Hornby.
• For teaching, Donald Murray and Doug Lemov

18. What words do you overuse?

• And so…

19. What’s your favorite guilty pleasure?

• This podcast. Watching TikToks. Playing Fortnite. Watching and betting on NFL Football.

20. What superpower would you like to have?

• To sleep well, let’s say a steady 8 hours
• Immediately teleporting to anywhere seems like a good one
• This made me wonder if Superman gets cold flying.

21. What animal or nonhuman being do you most identify with?

• Rivers

22. If you have a free solitary hour in your day, what do you typically do?

• Run and naps come to mind. A nap feels like a luxury but I find them pretty often.

23. What five items would you place in a time capsule?

• After thinking about Trump’s Access Hollywood tape, I decided I’d focus on local items for a local time capsule…

1. Zack Vernon’s Eating on a Mountain at the End of the World
2. an App State football helmet
3. Scars on the Mountain Helene Hurricane Documentary
4. Luke Combs 2017 album This One’s for You. It’s got “When It Rains It Pours on It.”
5. Mast store candy in a Mast store white paper bag

24. What does your writing space look like?

• A big inexpensive white desk facing two windows that look at a valley with the mountains beyond. Lots of basketball memorabilia on the left. A Ted Lasso cardboard cutout. Pop culture artifacts behind me such as a 1985 Celtics Championship hat, an App State volleyball a former Watauga player gave me, and a Super Mario Nintendo World statue.

What is Longreads?

• From their About Us page: Longreads, founded in 2009 by Mark Armstrong, is dedicated to finding and sharing the best longform nonfiction storytelling on the web. We publish personal and reported essays, criticism, reading lists, and occasional book excerpts, interviews, and more in-depth features.
• My favorite way they describe themselves: Longform journalism and creative nonfiction that outlasts the noise.

Anne Lamott is one of the writers answering these questions:

• Born in 1954 in San Francisco, she’s 72
• I came to her through her essay “Shitty First Drafts” and her book Bird by Bird.
• She married Neal Allen in 2019, her first and only marriage. He spent most of his life as a journalist.
• Neal and Anne worked together on a book Good Writing.
• Another of my favorite books of hers: Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers
• She’s got a great Ted Talk. My wife Megan watched her on Good Hang and ordered a few of her books.
• I’ve been wanting to read her first book, Operating Instructions. It’s about having a child and being a single mother.

Thanks for taking time to visit Torg Stories! We’d love to hear some of your answers in the comments below!

We’re all rookies on the Letterboxd site, but it seems to be a social networking website and app for movies. It reminds me of Goodreads but for films. We all chose our four favorite movies, found some people to follow, discovered some new movies, and looked for one more thing to do on the site. 

Here’s a few things I learned about Letterboxd: 

1. Headquarters are in Auckland, New Zealand
2. Started in Oct of 2011, so that’s over 15 years ago 
3. Over 30 million users 
4. Some notable account users from Wikipedia: Martin Scorsese, Charli XCX, Ed Sheeran, Francis Ford Coppola, and Michael Mann
5. From Wikipedia: The “Four Favorites” feature, which allows members to pin four films to the top of their profile, has become a prominent element of film publicity. Letterboxd’s editorial team conducts red carpet and junket interviews in which filmmakers, actors, and celebrities are asked to name their four favorite films.

We’re going to start by trying to guess each other’s four favorite films. Anne, what do you say we try and guess Izzy’s first? 

• My Izzy guesses: Sing Street, Beautiful Boy, Notting Hill, Moonrise Kingdom 

• My Anne guesses: 2001 A Space Odyssey, Bridesmaids, Best in Show, The Dark Knight 

What films were tough for me to leave out? 

1. Hoosiers. I worried it was too on the nose? 
2. Pulp Fiction. Seems stereotypical. 
3. Good Will Hunting 
4. Sinners 
5. The Royal Tenenbaums 
6. Edge of Tomorrow with Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt 

There’s an ability to communicate with movie posters sort of like some people do with emojis. I like a movie podcast called The Big Picture and one of its hosts, Sean Fennessy, signaled his distaste for the show’s new partnership with Netflix with this post:  

I didn’t know the $$$ film. I think it is this:

• $, also known as Dollar$, Dollars or $ (Dollars), and in the UK as The Heist, is a 1971 American heist comedy film starring Warren Beatty and Goldie Hawn

Find some people to follow. You can search names. You can find people who wrote about movies that interest you. Who did you follow? 

• Sean Fennessey. He has To Die For, Something weird’s on the air, Bamboozled, and Magnolia on his page. 
• Patrick Willems. I discovered him through his review of Air. I noticed he is followed by Sean. 

Figure out a way to discover a few movies you never heard of that look good. 

1. Find at least one “recent story” and read or watch it. Tell us about it. 

• I read a short article titled “Ben Affleck Knew He Had to Direct Animals.” Oh, it’s a summary of an article. 
• From the summary: The film follows Los Angeles mayoral candidate Mark Kimball (Affleck), whose campaign is upended when he and his wife Abigail (Kerry Washington) get a late-night phone call from a man claiming to have kidnapped his son.
• It links me to something called Tudum. It’s the script of an interview. 
• Affleck said this in the article about Los Angeles: I wanted to make a story that is really true to all of the disparate aspects of this city. It’s like a mosaic. If you’re on one of the tiles, it looks like that tile, but it’s adjacent to something that’s different from it, whether it’s socioeconomically, ethnically, culturally, or linguistically. This is a city where at least as many people speak Spanish as speak English. The movie moves into Spanish-language storytelling, not because it’s a Spanish story or an English story, but because those languages exist in LA, often side by side.

2. Do one more thing on Letterboxd. Tell us what you did. 

• I added Salesman to my watchlist. (it had a “play” button next to it on my list and took me right to our HBO account to watch)
• I downloaded the app and hope to keep adding films to my watchlist and I hear about them. 
• Reviewed Blackberry. 

Click here to check out and possibly connect with Bill on Letterboxd. 

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If you sit down to watch a movie, but you don’t know what you’re going to watch, how do you figure it out? In this post we look for a new process, identify 7 movies worth watching, discuss East of Eden, the yogurt shop murders, the Colts in London, an SNL report, and Izzy’s upcoming West Coast Road Trip!

Bill Torg’s Topics for Discussion 

When you want to watch a movie but don’t know what you’re going to watch, how do you find one? 

• Frustration of trying to click around on the platforms we subscribe to: Netflix, HBO, Apple, Amazon (Fandango) 
• What reviews, if any, do you take into account when picking? Amazon stars from those who watch and the Tomatometer / Popcornmeter on Rotten Tomatoes. 
• For the first time, I used the Rotten Tomatoes “watch at home” page where I could toggle to the platform (Netflix, Prime, HBOMax, etc) and look at ratings that way. Click here for that page. 
• Should I try Letterboxd? They talk about it on The Big Picture podcast. Looks like a sort of Goodreads for movies. I think we could explore it for next time. Click here to access Letterboxd. 

We narrowed it down to these seven movies to watch:

Squid and The Whale on Netflix 

• From RT: A pair of brothers living in Brooklyn are caught in the middle of, and deeply affected by, the divorce of their erudite parents, Bernard (Jeff Daniels) and Joan Berkman (Laura Linney). Older sibling Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) sides with dad and acts out at school, while younger brother Frank (Owen Kline) quietly backs up mom. The household tension rises further when Joan’s writing career takes off and surpasses the failed ambitions of her professor ex-husband.
• Directed by Noah Baumbach. One of the producers is Wes Anderson. Baumbach is 57. Was married to Jennifer Jason Leigh and now married to Greta Gerwig. Co wrote Barbie screenplay. White Noise. 

The Menu on Netflix. 

• From RT: A couple (Anya Taylor-Joy and Nicholas Hoult) travels to a coastal island to eat at an exclusive restaurant where the chef (Ralph Fiennes) has prepared a lavish menu, with some shocking surprises.
• Also starred John Leguizamo and Hong Chau 
• Directed by Mark Mylod. He’s done episodes of Entourage, Game of Thrones 
• One of the producers was Will Ferrell. 

The Invite (coming soon) on HBO 

• From RT: Joe and Angela’s marriage is on thin ice. When they invite their enigmatic upstairs neighbors for a dinner party, the night spirals into unexpected places. Have they reignited the spark or the lit the match that burns it all down?
• Stars Olivia Wilde, Seth Rogen, Penelope Cruz, and Edward Norton 
• Directed by Olivia Wilde 

End of Oak Street (rental on Amazon) 

• From RT: After a mysterious cosmic event rips Oak Street from suburbia and transports their neighborhood to someplace unknown, the Platt family soon discovers that their very survival depends on them sticking together as they navigate their now unrecognizable surroundings.
• Starring Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor
• Directed by David Robert Mitchell (also It Follows) 

Obsession (rental on Amazon)  

• From RT: After breaking the mysterious “One Wish Willow” to win his crush’s heart, a hopeless romantic finds himself getting exactly what he asked for but soon discovers that some desires come at a dark, sinister price.
• Starring Michael Johnston, Inde Navarrette, Cooper Tomlinson
• Directed by Curry Barker (YouTube channel “that’s a bad idea” 1.62 million) 27 years old

Blackberry on Netflix

• ‘BlackBerry’ tells the story of Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, the two men that charted the course of the spectacular rise and catastrophic demise of the world’s first smartphone.
• Starring Jay Baruchel, Glenn Howerton, rich Sommer
• Directed by Matt Johnson. He’s Canadian, MFA from York University, started in independent docufiction. Did Nirvanna the Band the Show. 
• Izzy, how aware are you of an MFA in filmmaking or screenwriting are you after Utah? 

X on HBO. 

• From RT: In 1979, a group of young filmmakers set out to make an adult film in rural Texas, but when their reclusive, elderly hosts catch them in the act, the cast find themselves fighting for their lives.
• Starring Mia Goth, Jenna Ortega, Martin Henderson, Brittany Snow 
• Directed by Ti West. Drinking Buddies, The ABCs of Death and his movie MaXXXine gets tomato numbers in the 70s. 

Megan picked The Menu. We recommend it. Why? 

• Very unusual: we get a menu that is an outline that the film follows. We get the ingredients on the screen which is sometimes crass and funny. 
• It is in the spirit of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, Passenger 10, The Knives Out movies. Suspenseful. Pretty gory but not over the top. 
• Satire of foodies, critics of all kinds, and the ultra rich. 

Honorable Mention Stuff to Read or Watch: 

• Ted Lasso Season 4, Episode 9 was the best of the season. Heart wrenching with Mae and tribute to Anthony Head. Roy and Keeley! Roy’s reenactment of the game. Finally know why Tracey Ullman is on the show. 
• Fever’s season ends: Mitchell and Clark couldn’t make enough of their threes / finishes. Wilson and Gray make more mid range tough jumpers than Fever can hit threes. They get calls but they also are attacking the rim and defender more. A’ja Wilson really bothers everyone around the rim. (the league is tough, Clark can get better, not sure of the ceiling of this team, parity) 
• NoDa and Camp North End in Charlotte. Tipsy Pickle. Cabo Fish Taco. Vintage stores. Hardy Boys Records. 

Anne’s Discussion Topics

“East of Eden” on Netflix 

• Florence Pugh, Christopher Abbott. Showrunner/writer Zoe Kazan, granddaughter to movie director Elia Kazan
• Florence was great. Most characters are hard to like or at least very frustrating. Have you read John Steinbeck book? I’ve read zero books by him.
• Secrets, parents expectations, fate, making your own choices, “thou mayest”, tell your kids the truth!
• From the book preface: East of Eden hit the bookstores in midsummer of 1952. The 602-page novel sold for $4.50. By November it had become the nation’s number-one best-seller. A limited edition of 750 copies had been distributed to “important reviewers” and was followed by a run of 110,000, what Steinbeck called “one hell of a big first edition.”
• The opening two paragraphs of the novel: The Salinas Valley is in Northern California. It is a long narrow swale between two ranges of mountains, and the Salinas River winds and twists up the center until it falls at last into Monterey Bay. I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers. I remember where a toad may live and what time the birds awaken in the summer—and what trees and seasons smelled like—how people looked and walked and smelled even. The memory of 
• odors is very rich.
• East of Eden
• Click here for the novel on Amazon. We are an Amazon affiliate. 

“He Was a Suspect in the Yogurt Shop Murders for Thirty Years. He Can’t Forget” by Michael Hall in Texas Monthly

• Forrest Welborn was a suspect as his best friend implicated him in a confession. Later DNA revealed the real killer.
• Pressured confessions…need actual evidence, pressure to solve murders, public outcry
• Would you stick around in the area you live if this happened to you? Google your name and you are always linked.
• He Was A Suspect…

Izzy’s Discussion Topics 

• Izzy is going on a West coast road trip! Stops: Oregon Coast, Redwood National Park and San Francisco!
• Working on my film! It is “due” Monday so today will be spent all on that. 
• Recent SNL update: Dakota Johnson hosted, James and I fell asleep. She threw shade at my man Role Model. “Bad in bed” and “lame breakups.” Taylor came on. Next week: Shane Gillis with musical guest Rosalia. 
• Upcoming concerts: Hey, Nothing, Big Thief and maybe Malcom Todd. I recommend End of Oak Street. A family is mysteriously transported with their entire neighborhood to an unknown, dangerous world. They must stick together and uncover what happened while fighting to survive.

Thanks for checking out this Torg Stories Post!

This week on the Torg Stories Podcast, we’ve got some SNL Lorne-isms, Tom Cruise had a big week, Anne and I both saw the film The Whisper Man, and Izzy gives a report from the Role Model concert. 

Stories Bill Read or Watched: 

1. SNL Lorne Michaels biography. Here are some work. I’m doing interesting work how do other people feel you know his answer is just didn’t reveal a lot. Did you happen to read it to but golden lines: 

• Remember Podunk! You’ve got audience in all fifty states.
• The quickest way to kill off somebody talented is to let him do everything he wants. 
• Cocaine is God’s way of telling you you have too much money. 
• One of the unusual things about SNL is that the writers are in charge of producing their own pieces. 
• When there are too many things going on in a scene, he says, “You’re putting a hat on a hat.” (Another term for this is premise overload). 
• When the details are accurate, your brain goes, “Somebody’s taken care of this.” 
• “Do it in sunshine,” which means, don’t forget that comedy is an entertainment. Colors should be bright, costumes flattering.
• Michaels dropped in and out, and at one session he made a plea: “Please don’t use cocaine. It doesn’t make you funnier. It only makes you think you’re funnier.”
• It’s a 672 page paperback. I just made it to the 50% mark. 

2. The 2026 Emmys! 

• A fun freshman show, the Apple TV horror-comedy “Widow’s Bay,” nearly ran the table on the comedy side.
• Matthew Rhys (Rees) is a beast after all. Rhys made history on Monday by becoming the first person to win two lead acting Emmys in one night. He took home prizes for the Netflix crime thriller mini-series “The Beast in Me” and the Apple TV horror-comedy hit “Widow’s Bay.”
• But Parton also received her own dedicated tribute from Reba McEntire, another beloved country music superstar, who shared a decades-long friendship with Parton in which they sometimes sang and acted together. McEntire performed one of Parton’s songs, “Appalachian Memories,” a ballad about the region’s cultural heritage.
• Click here for NY Times article. 

Anne’s Read or Watched This Week: 

1. “Tom Cruise: Hollywood’s Most Elusive Star Speaks” by Zach Baron Interview in GQ

• Tom Cruise Interview
• Interesting how he answers questions – he kind of ignores it and answers it by saying he loves working with people and figuring out how to make the best movie.
• Talks a lot about having personal goals and challenging
• When asked if he fears death in regards to doing stunts like in MI films:   “But here’s the thing: How do we use these tools to create an emotional effect on an audience? And is it communicating what we want to communicate? So do I fear death? No. I don’t. It’s not like I’m not afraid. I don’t mind the feeling. I understand life has certainties and uncertainties. And in making movies and living life, what interests me is: Let’s move the uncertainties more into the certainties, but I want to create other uncertainties, so that we’re moving forward and it’s part of the adventure of it.” Are you ever afraid onscreen or off? TC: There’s stuff where you want to feel that. You want to feel that uncertainty. But I’m not afraid to feel afraid. I don’t know how else to say it. I’m not afraid to go, “Okay, I know this is a leap and let’s take the jump. Let’s go.” And I try to recognize things that I don’t know, and I don’t pretend to know things that I know and things that I don’t know. So that’s how I feel about it. Are you afraid of death? Are you afraid to be afraid?
• A Cruise line that makes me think of Izzy: “I mean, these guys that are painting backgrounds and building the sets and moving the cameras, lighting, every area of making a movie—it’s light, architecture, the design, all of it, to entertain audiences,”

2. The Death of Trotsky by Josh Ireland

• The Death of Trotsky
• Interesting, easy to read. Gives some nice insight to Trotsky/Stalin plus the guy (Ramon Mercader agent for NKVD) who ultimately killed Trotsky with an ice pick. Plus some Frida Kahlo and Diego Revera mentions.
• How far will you go for your beliefs? Political or otherwise. Most of us think it is wrong to murder, but some people have such strong belief in the moral rightness they will do anything.
• Good exchange illuminating Stalin that Kamenev related, the group is day drinking and talking with each other (all communist party leaders), answering the question “What is the finest thing in the world?”
  • Kamenev: “Books”
  • Radek: “A woman, your woman”
  • Rykov: “Cognac”
  • Stalin: “The greatest delight is to mark one’s enemy, prepare everything, avenge oneself thoroughly, and then go to sleep.”

3. The Whisper Man on Netflix directed by James Ashcroft

• Starring Robert De Niro
• The Whisper Man
• Avg movie, did creep me out
• Never live in a big old house with creepy open windows and mail slots in the door

Izzy Podcast Agenda and Notes 

1. Role model concert 

• He did not play the Wedding which is very important 
• He is just as amazing and beautiful in person 

2. Watched the film Obsession finally

• It was made so so well for the budget of 740,000 and on a 20 day schedule. Did not like the story line, thought writing got weird at the end. 

3. Started watching Gilmore Girls for the 7th time because fall has begun. 

• Talk about Rory’s boyfriend controversy 
• I have no alone time at school but I create moments to watch now 

Honorable Mention

• learned that the secret lives of Mormon wives are a big deal and people in Utah see them around with other men and gossip about it 

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