Author: Torg

Writing Teacher at App State, Head Women's Basketball Coach at Watauga HS in Boone NC and podcaster at Torg Stories

Vacationing at Home

When I was thirty years old, my life was a mess.  There were things I wanted to do that I almost never did: read, write, and exercise were a couple of the big ones.  However, I did other things that I didn’t want to do:  drank a lot of alcohol, stayed out half the night, and watched a lot of television, primarily sports.  I felt like I was wasting my life and stuck in some destructive cycles.  No matter how many promises I made to myself that I would change, I didn’t seem to be able to break my bad habits.

Among the actions I took to try and change my life was that  I moved 700 or so miles to the southeast of where I was living in Indiana to Charlotte, North Carolina.  My move filled me with mental and physical energy to explore:  I hiked the mountains around Asheville, I went rafting, I drove to the Outer Banks, and I enrolled in graduate school.  Beyond that, I went out of my way to avoid routine and instead try new things:  I hung out in bookstores and I went to live acoustic shows to hear artists of whom I’d never heard.  I tried to run both literal and figurative new paths each week.

Life got better. I did what I intended to do, but I also began to think about all that I had not done back in Indiana.  I realized it was in my nature (a lot of our natures?) to go on vacation and explore, but I was apt to stay put in my routines and the places I knew when I was at home.  I’d been to Honolulu with the basketball team and trekked all over the island to be sure that I wouldn’t miss anything, but back home in Indiana, I had never even been up to Lake Michigan to spend the day at the sand dunes.  Thinking back on those experiences, I’m determined to try and get out with my family to see the places near where I live.

An Elevator Pitch for HORSESHOE

Love on the Big Screen Flannery O'Connor Milledgeville Georgia College and State University
The Theater Pictured on Cover is in Milledgeville, Georgia. Home to Georgia College and Flannery O'Connor

There’s a big difference between what I learned doing an MFA Degree in Creative Writing at a place like Georgia College and what I’ve learned being in New York, reading for a literary agency, and beginning to hang around literary business types here.  Both experiences (my MFA and living here) have worked together to teach me a lot of what I want and need to know.

What I needed right away for life in NYC was an elevator pitch.  In other words, I needed to be able to summarize in one sentence what my book was about.  For Love on the Big Screen, it didn’t take me so long to come up with this:  Love on the Big Screen tells the story of Zuke, a college freshman whose understanding of love has been shaped by late-eighties romantic comedies.  People usually responded to this line with a laugh and publishing and film reps usually requested to read more after hearing that one sentence.

Love on the Big Screen Flannery O'Connor Milledgeville Georgia College and State University Winamac, Indiana, Horseshoe
Horseshoe will be set in a fictionalized Winamac, Indiana

So here I go again with a new book and a new need for 1 sentence summaries and a short synopsis.  Here’s where I am at:

In the rural town of Horseshoe, where everyone knows everybody else’s business, the lives of its citizens intertwine for thirteen bizarre tales of faith, sin, guilt, and deliverance.  Think:  Flannery O’Connor’s “Misfit” Fiction Meets Pulp Fiction.

Any of that catch your attention?

And here’s the short synopsis:

The little town of Horseshoe becomes the protagonist in this unique novel-in-stories format that bucks against the boundaries of time and asks readers to make the connections to put the story together.  The book initiates in the local grocery store where a churchwoman named Pam Scott delivers judgment on a philandering butcher.  Pam returns home, a place where each night she faces what is either a figment of her imagination or an increasingly terrifying knocker.  In this little town where everyone knows everybody else’s business, the lives of its citizens intertwine for thirteen bizarre tales of faith, sin, guilt, and deliverance.

I wrote both the one-sentence summary and the short synopsis in conversation with the team at Cherokee McGhee.  As I say in class all the time, “Writing Floats on a Sea of Conversation.”  Without conversation, I don’t have much to say.  If you’ll look over there to the right of the page, you’ll find all the virtual places where we might chat up reading, writing, and teaching.

Cherokee McGhee, Love on the Big Screen, Horseshoe, William Torgerson, Tarantino, O'Connor, Pulp Fiction, 80s, Lloyd Dobler, Farmer Ted, John Hughes
Cherokee McGhee Press: publisher of Love on the Big Screen and Horseshoe

Why call a book HORSESHOE?

If you know my character “Zuke” from Love on the Big Screen, I wrote that he was from a small town called Horseshoe.  In my mind, Zuke’s hometown is a fictionalized version of Winamac, Indiana.  The word “horseshoe” as the title of my novel-in-stories comes from the way my small hometown of Winamac sits on a horseshoe bend of the Tippecanoe River in North-Central Indiana.   This geographical feature is something you can see for yourself on Google Maps:

William Torgerson, Bill, Torg, Love on the Big Screen, Horseshoe, St. John's University
From Google Maps: See the Horseshoe Bend in the Tippecanoe River?

Winamac is the town where my parents are from and their parents are from before that, and even though I wasn’t born there, it’s the place where I graduated from high school and the place I say I’m from if anyone ever asks.  When people in Winamac say the horseshoe,they mean the road that runs along the outer edge of the town park which is almost pinched into an island by a sharp-hook bend of the river.  I lived in two different houses when I lived in Winamac:  one right on the river where I could look across the water, see the road everyone called the horseshoe, and also the basketball courts.  I was a bad cross-country runner in high school, and practice was often held in the park where we ran in packs and did repeats of the three-quarter mile loop.  The second house I lived in is the house where I placed the character Matthew Walker’s family.  Pam Scott, a woman haunted by the sound of a knocker, lives in the house my grandmother lives in today.

William Torgerson, Bill, Torg, Love on the Big Screen, Horseshoe, St. John's University, winamac, Indiana
The Swinging Bridge in the Winamac Town Park

Plans For the Blog This Summer and a Kiss From My Girls

Fans of Cherokee McGhee and Facebook friends of mine played a crucial role in the cover of my novel Love on the Big Screen.  The team at Cherokee McGhee shared sample covers and the feedback some of you all gave us caused us to have the title put on an actual marquee of a theater that meant something to me. Thank you all for participating in that.  The cover of Love on the Big Screen was truly a collaborative effort.  I’m looking to tap into that great experience and expand it.

I’ve got some ideas for the blog in the coming months.  I was thinking of inviting you all into the revision process.  Currently, there is a draft of a novel-in-stories that Cherokee McGhee has announced they will publish.  There were notes from the press for me and I worked on those revisions and just finished.  Now today, following this entry, I’ll go off to the post office and mail the manuscript to the editor.

I was thinking of doing a series of posts that share the title and a bit of each of the 13 stories.  Possibly you would comment on titles that engage you, first paragraphs that don’t, and so on.  There’s also some room for changes in the structure of the novel when it comes to the order of the stories.  I’m especially interested in the first paragraph any potential reader would try out in some virtual location such as the Google Preview through IndieBound or the “Look Inside” function of Amazon.  It’s in my mind that these are places people who use eReaders might check out books first.  Would you be interested in looking at excerpts of the current draft and offering your thoughts?

What else might you like for me to address?  I’ve got several ideas ranging from family film reviews from my daughters to offering my perspective on Book Expo America, a massive conference where I was given one of my first overviews of the publishing industry and the discombobulated state it’s in.  Currently, there is a lot up for grabs.  If you’ve got ideas for future posts, I’d love to hear them, and until then, here’s a little hello from my daughters and me.

More news from the urinal:

As a teacher on campus, there’s always the possibility of coming across students I’m teaching or have taught in the restrooms.  This morning right before class, I made a pit stop at the urinals.  One of my students walked up and took his place a couple s places down.  I could tell he was looking my way, and so I looked to see if he was going to say anything.

“Morning Torg,” he said, sort of laughing.

“Am I the first professor with whom you chatted at the urinal?”

“Yes,” he said, looking thoughtful, as if he had more to say.   “I”m not quite sure how to say this.”

“Uh, huh.”

“I think you’re the first professor I’ve ever talked to.”

It might be that he meant outside of class, which would be bad enough, but I think he may have meant that he’d never talked with any of his profs anywhere.