Tag: St. John’s University

Library Book Browsing Activity

Find the Book You Were Looking For

(or the one you didn’t know you were looking for)

Torg, Torgerson, St. John's University, Reading, Research, Writing, books, teaching
Yep, Young People Still Look at Books

The Activity:  (take notes in your daybook)

  1. Walk over to the library with someone you don’t know very well, and chat with them about their intellectual interests.  What did they find during the last library trip?  What do they think they might read and write about this semester?  Note your partner’s name and write down some of what they say to you.
  2. As we get in the hallways of the library, check out the signs on the wall that inform you what numbers (PN 1345  etc) are on what floor.  You can also check with me, or the staff of the library for help.
  3. You were to come to class with three call numbers for books in the Queens library that might interest you.  Try to find these books.
  4. As you find a book, be sure to check around the same shelf and the shelves close to your book to see if there is anything there that interests you.  This could be a section of the library that you return to again and again.  Write down the author and title of a book that is close to the book that you meant to find.  You’re going to spend the class reading and you’ll check out a book or two at the end of our time.  Be thinking about what books you might want to take with you.

Take Notes in Your Daybook that look something like this:

Book 1 Title and Author:__________________________________________________________________________

Book Close to Book 1 Title and Author:____________________________________________________________

  1. When you’re done, you should have written down the names of at least six books: the three books you were looking for and the book that looked interesting that was near the book you were looking for.
  2. Take books with you that you might want to read around in.  You don’t need to re-shelve these.  From what I understand, the library wants to get a sense of what books you are looking at.  There are carts placed around the library where you put the books when you are done looking at them.
  3. Sit down somewhere in the library and read around in the books and see what you find interesting.
What Floor Are the Writing Books On?

Homework

  1. For this week or next week, do a Reading For Writing (RFW) entry on a book that you check out from the library.  See the syllabus for a full description, but this means you’ll choose golden lines from the article.  Type up those lines in bold, and then free write after the quote sharing whatever the writing gets you thinking about.
  2. Somewhere in the piece, tell us about whom you visited with.
  3. Be sure to use the “son of citation” website (or something like it) to give the full MLA works cited entry at the bottom of your post.
  4. Copy and paste that works cited entry into your “Reading Bibliography” tab on your blog.
  5. Print out a copy of the entry for reading groups next Wednesday and bring your book or books to class next time.

Want the handout?  See the handout tab at TheTorg.Com

 

Did the PCC’ers Visit You On Your Way Marriage?

As Josh Henkin’s novel Matrimony kicks off, there is no sign of marriage, just college dorm hilarity when the PCC-ers—Peer Contraceptive Counselors—come for a visit to educate the new freshman dorm dwellers.  Given the pacing, I forgot that this was a book that purported to be about marriage and I started to expect a story that took place in a small college over a couple of days, or at most, a semester.  I could feel some of my own Love on the Big Screen story coming on when there was some early bathroom talk between the protagonist Julian and his roommate Carter:

It’s bad enough to pee in your own shower,” his roommate said.  “But in a communal shower?”  He looked up at Julian.  “You don’t pee in the shower, do you?”

“No,” Juian said.  From time to time, he had.  Didn’t everyone?

Joshua Henkin's novel, MATRIMONY

I love Henkin’s timing with his “From time to time, he had,” line.  The sentences are full of those sorts of attention-grabbing surprises, and you’ll hear a lot more from Julian and his roommate, interesting stuff, about how men navigate relationships, especially when those relationships overlap.  Henkin deftly takes big jumps in time when it comes to the narrative, and this is mostly achieved by dividing the story into geographically organized sections:  Northington, Ann Arbor, Berkley, Iowa City, and New York.  It’s with these jumps in time that Henkin is able to go down into specific detail while still telling the story of what it is to be married, at least for Julian and his wife Mia.

Julian and Mia make decisions that have consequences and things happen to their marriage that sometimes happen in relationships.  In reading the book, I’m reminded that I heard Henkin say several times at the Wesleyan Writers Conference something to this effect:  When writing, you want smart characters who are capable of intelligent mistakes.  While none of the events or mistakes that concern Mia and Julian are shocking, all of them are a surprise, probably because the range of things that can happen to any couple—get hit by a car, find out the apartment is full of rats, or make a million in the stock market—is nearly infinite.  Things happen to the couple and it’s interesting to read about how each character responds and interacts with and toward their spouse.

A Picture of Henkin from His Website

Matrimony can sometimes feel like a book on the art of writing.  Julian and his friend Carter are both writers who attend a workshop class taught by a Professor Chesterfield who spouts guidance such as this:  “THOU SHALT NOT CONFUSE A SHORT STORY WITH A RUBIK’S CUBE.”  I sometimes hear folks criticize writers who write books about characters who want to write books  (I see their point) but I think the writing process of everyone who writes is so highly personal and individualized that it’s usually interesting to hear how writers do what they do.  This is a book more about marriage than writing, but there’s also a funny bit where a character writes a story with a character who thinks about breaking up with their boyfriend for over 20 pages.  Thankfully we don’t have to read the pages; we just comically hear about the story from other characters as the novel proceeds.  In this way Henkin is a skilled comedian who uses repetition to make the joke even funnier than it was the first time.

Henkin keeps the language fresh, and for awhile I was thinking that maybe there was at least one vocabulary word for me on every page.  Here’s a few I jotted down that I had to look up:  petard, jejune, peremptoriness, bathetic, somnolent, and bivouacking.  Of course there is much more to fresh language than my vocab list, but I found myself marking interesting word choices as I read.  Most of the characters are book lovers and part of the reward for reading this novel was their lively wordplay banter.

For a guy like me who has spent a lot of time thinking about how relationships work and don’t work, Matrimony presents a view of marriage that makes sense to me:  hard stuff happens and the couple tries to hang in together and on some levels they succeed and on others they fail.  Part of what was interesting here was to see what the couple decides to do about splitting up or staying together.   From the complexities of in-laws to a crazy dog in a small NYC apartment, Matrimony shows readers a marriage worth paying attention to.

Would you vote for your favorite logline for my Horseshoe script?

“The Church and the Fiction Writer” Prof. Torg Talking With O’Connor’s Text

I’ve previously described myself as a Christian who doesn’t go to church.  This may or may not be a permanent part of my life:  not going to church.  Sometimes I miss the sorts of sermons that are like the best classroom lessons I’ve experienced, or I miss the lift in spirit I have previously felt when I raise my ugly singing voice within a congregation.

Recently, I attended a writing conference at Wesleyan University in Connecticut where O’Connor’s Mystery and Manners was often invoked.  It’s book I had somehow not yet read, and while I waited for the copy I’d ordered to arrive, I browsed the library collection at St. John’s University in New York and came across  O’Connor’s “The Church and the Fiction Writer.”  It’s  an essay that interests me from the standpoint of being a Christian who writes stories which often contain curse words, sex, and people doing ugly things to one another.  It’s subject matter that might be tricky if I was teaching somewhere such as my fictional Pison Nazarene University and it’s also subject matter that is tricky when I’m talking with my parents about my work.  As some of you might know, parents often weigh in with their thoughts no matter how old you get.  I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I imagine O’Connor possibly responding in her essay to questions such as these:

  • Why can’t you write a happy story?  Why does there have to be cursing, violence, and sex?
  • Why does there have to be so many shadows from your own life?  Why can’t you just make everything up?
  • Why do you have to write so much about the place you come from?

Here are some lines in bold I’ve plucked from O’Connor’s essay and a few of mine own thoughts which follow. 

“The writer learns, perhaps more quickly than the reader, to be humble in the face of what-is.”  Life works with my mind to give me ideas, people, and situations about which to write.  I have those to choose from.  I try to become the characters and report what happens in and out of minds. I try to point to spots in life that are interesting to me and so might tend to be interesting to some of you.

“A belief in fixed dogma cannot fix what goes on in life or blind the believer to it.”  No matter your belief in God or no God, life is happening in front of you.  Art such as O’Connor’s helps me to pay attention to life that I would have otherwise missed. 

Perhaps partially in response to, “Why can’t you write about happy things?” O’Connor wrote this:   An affirmative vision cannot be demanded of him (the writer) without limiting his freedom to observe what man has done with the things of God.

What would make a person fearful of reading fiction?   It is when the individual’s faith is weak, not when it is strong, that he will be afraid of an honest fictional representation of life…  O’Connor’s line evokes for me those who would never read Barack Obama or Bill O’Reilly.  If they are one side, they can’t stand to hear the other. 

Citation information:

O’Connor, Flannery.  “The Church and the Fiction Writer.”  Flannery O’Connor Collected Works.  Comp. Sally Fitzgerald.    New York:  Literary Classics of the United States, 1988. Print.

William Torgerson on Flannery O'Connor The Church Fiction Writer
Click Here to Read About O'Connor's Cartoons


To Marry or Not? Finding Answers in Suicide Hill

It may or may not be obvious that stories can come from all sorts of places and get written for all sorts of reasons.  Take for example “Suicide Hill.”  It was the first story I ever mentally composed, (as opposed to writing it on paper or typing it on a computer) and I “wrote” it by saying it silently over and over again to myself as I proctored an end-of-course language arts test to middle school students in North Carolina.  The story was partly written out of boredom (what else to do?) but also for a more practical reason:  I had decided I wanted to earn a graduate degree in creative writing, and I needed a story to turn in as a writing sample.

William Torgerson, Bill, Torg, St. John's University, Cherokee McGhee Press
My Mental Setting for Suicide Hill: Crown Hill Cemetery in Winamac, Indiana

Back then–this was around the year 2000–the only other text I had written was a messed-up manuscript that represented one year’s worth of writing where each morning before school I typed up 800 words of whatever I could remember about getting divorced.  It was in fact the very manuscript that clued me in that I needed some help learning to write.  I didn’t really even know what getting help might mean back then, (now it means I had to learn how to read like a writer) but I’d read John Irving somewhere saying something about how Kurt Vonnegut had saved him a lot of time. (Vonnegut, I proudly remind you, is a fellow native of Indiana.)

According to Irving, Vonnegut had been able to teach him something that sped up the process of learning to write.  Perhaps even more importantly, I was beginning to believe that writing was something that could be learned sort of in the same way I’d learned to shoot a basketball:  with some of the right fundamentals, a lot of desire, and an enormous amount of regular practice.

Can you learn to write in the same way you can learn to play ball? Here I am in my younger days.

Next came the question that pops up every year or so for me:  what to write?  Back when I’d earned an MA in English Education, I participated in something The National Writing Project calls the summer institute.  Doing that, I’d prepared a teaching demonstration (think writing teachers writing together) that had emerged from my reading of Stephen King’s On Writing.  I had potential writers survey their life for details looking for subject matter they could bring into a story.  I applied that lesson to my own thinking and what I began to consider was that I was in a relationship that was teetering toward marriage, this even though I’d promised myself to never marry again.  Back then, I was in a relationship great enough that it was challenging my old promise to myself to keep to myself.  In writing “Suicide Hill,” I wanted to write a story that would tell me how to live my life.  It worked, but not in the way that I expected it to.