Do you like NFL quarterback trade of Carolina Panthers Cam Newton trade straight up for Indianapolis Colts Andrew Luck?
click on the player above or click here for iTunes
Cheese is back on the podcast! He’s a Colts season ticket holder and head boys basketball coach at Loogootee High School in Indiana. We talk about whether either of us would trade Cam Newton for Andrew Luck straight up. We also talk about Newton as a way into talking about our fandom and what we think of on field celebrations and post game press conference walk offs. I bring up Gronk’s party cruise and you’d be right to tell me to stay in my own lane when I speak the words, “Flo Rida.”
Loogootee H.S. Gym by Coach Chezem
Torg Stories Podcast is available in the podcast app of your iPhone. To help support us, you can subscribe and/or review the podcast. Thanks for listening!
p.s. We would be totally pumped if you’d copy and paste this link to share on a social network.
In this week’s podcast Torg thinks through macro and micro thinking as related to Howard Rheingold’s book, Net Smart: How to Thrive Online. Torg applies the idea of micro and macro thinking to his upcoming research leave and the coaching of his daughters’ basketball team. There’s also a response to some nonsense about the difference between a professor and a teacher.
Torg goes it alone on this week’s podcast and begins by talking about some of the ideas in Howard Rheingold’s book, Net Smart: How to Thrive Online. Torg applies the idea of micro and macro thinking to his upcoming research leave and the coaching of his daughters’ basketball team. He finishes off by discussing an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Silly Sanctimonious Games: How a Syllabus Sparked a War Between a Professor and a College.” Torg explains why he thinks the claim in the article about the difference between a professor and a teacher is nonsense.
Queens World Film Festival: F*** You Cancer Edition
Podcast Available in the Podcast App of Your iPhone
click here to listen on iTunes and here for Stitcher
I talk making stuff, movies, surviving cancer and love with the directors of the Queens World Film Festival, Don and Katha Cato.
Our conversation begins by talking about the “Best in Fest” film, Pop Meets the Void.
Don and Katha direct the Queens World Film Festival where our Torg Stories film “Christopher’s Garden” screened. During our conversation, Katha tells her story of going from small town Arizona to Oregon and on to New York City while Don talks about meeting Katha and putting her in his first films. There are some movie deals gone wrong, and Katha talks about art in relation to her cancer diagnosis. There’s also a behind the scenes “look” at how festivals are produced.
Torg Stories books, films, basketball player development, and podcasts.
Torg Stories is a place for me to write about what tugs at my attention. I spend a lot of my time thinking about writing and the teaching of writing, content creation, and coaching basketball. Over the years, I’ve directed four films, had three books of fiction published, and won several screenplay awards. I’ve organized some of the topics I write about into the following categories:
Like Holden Caulfield says in The Catcher in the Rye, “The trouble with me is, I like it when somebody digresses. It’s more interesting and all.” Rather than chastise myself about too many digressions or what could be seen as a scatterbrained approach to my work, I’ll say my writing here embraces an interdisciplinary way of thinking that allows for more of life to come in from the outside and get onto the screen. A big hope for this space is that it might allow us to learn from each other and share a good story or two. Like this one time, me and my family–having never rafted on our own in our entire lives–rafted 149 miles of the French Broad River…
Charlotte, Bill, Izzy and Megan Torgerson with Hot Springs, NC in the Background
A bit more about me: I’m a native Midwesterner who was born in Logansport, Indiana and a person who moved to Illinois to go to college, back to Indiana to teach and coach, to North Carolina for graduate school, to Georgia for more graduate school, to New York City to teach at St. John’s University, to Connecticut to escape the crowds, back to New York City to escape the commute, back to North Carolina for the mountains, back to Indiana to coach, and now we Torgs are getting ready for another move back to North Carolina. Next fall I will begin a lecturer position teaching composition at Appalachian State University in Boone. A few things I learned the past year:
I found it impossible to meet my expectations for the kind of English teacher, basketball coach, husband, and dad I wanted to be balancing all of those responsibilities.
I want to be free in the late afternoons to spend time with my wife and daughters, whether it’s playing hoops, working out, doing homework, creating content, or going on family adventures.
We Torgs feel at home in the mountains of North Carolina.
Below, you’ll see a bit of what I’ve been up to over the years:
Pat Conroy called The Coach’s Wife, “One of the best books about basketball and coaching I have ever read with a love story so complicated and wonderful it will have book groups talking about it for years.”
Thanks to Pat. I learned a lot about writing from reading his work, and I’m thankful to be able to keep hearing from him via his books.
***
Horseshoe is Midwestern Gothic collection of stories with themes about love, sin, guilt, and redemption.
In Love on the Big Screen, Zuke is a college freshman whose understanding of love has been shaped by late-80’s romantic comedies.
Films
The Mushroom Hunter is about my father and his buddies’ passion for hunting morel mushrooms.
Click here to watch “The Mushroom Hunter” free online.
