Tag: Winamac

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

If You’ve Moved Around A lot, How Do You Know Where You’re From?

Whether it was a house, an apartment, or a condo, the building I’ve called home in my life has changed twenty-three times in my thirty-nine years.  Last summer, for the first time in twelve years, I didn’t move.  Sometimes I moved twice in one year. Given all that, how do I know where I’m from?  What do I call my hometown?

Kayaking on the Tippy with (not pictured) Bassmaster Kevin "Herb" Larkin

For me, these questions weren’t so hard to figure out.  I just “felt” their answers, a state-of-knowing by feeling that I usually try to avoid.  For about ten years I let my feelings be the primary rudder that directed my life and they took me into some pretty treacherous waters.  “Do I feel as if I love her?”  Now I try to let my thinking tell me what to do, and I find that if I just do what I know to do, my feelings will often fill in the sails of action behind me.

But in the case of “where I’m from,” I know the answer in my gut:  Winamac, Indiana.  Although it’s not where I was born or where I went to school through the seventh grade, it’s the place where I graduated from high school and the town where both of my parents grew up.  Winamac is a small town set up high on the bank of a horseshoe bend of the Tippecanoe River.  I remember once when I went away to college and brought a friend home for a long weekend. He asked, “When are we going to get on the interstate?”  Travelling from Kankakee, Illinois to Winamac there are only two-lane roads and lots of corn fields.  We weren’t getting on any interstate.

In 1984 I was fourteen years old and burning to see Eddie Murphy’s Beverley Hills Cop.  All my friends were going; they had permission from their parents to see the rated “R” rated flick, but my mom told me I wasn’t old enough to go.  I hatched a plan for circumventing my mother, and my first mistake was that I stopped pestering her to go.  Like my own daughter now, when I wanted something, my primary plan was to beat my mother into submission with countless repeated requests.  Letting it go to fast probably sparked her suspicion that something was up.  My buddies were going to an afternoon matinée and so when show time came around, I told my mom I was doing something like going down to the park to shoot hoops.  She said fine and I was a bit surprised.

The Isis Theater Where My Mother Cut Me Off At the Pass Twenty-Six Years Ago

I went straight to the Isis Theater, but when I got to the ticket counter—facing an attendant for all I knew I’d never seen before—I was denied admission. Although I don’t remember anything about the attendant, I do remember what he or she said:  “Your mom called and told us not to let you in.”  Mom was smart:  who cares about where Bill is; I know where he wants to go.

So Winamac—where the Pizza King is tasty, the bike paths are flat, and a nice day is best spent on the Tippy—it’s the place where I say I’m from.  As for my oldest daughter—the child of a Midwesterner and a Southerner, born in Macon, Georgia; one-time resident of Queens and now living in Connecticut—I can’t imagine from where the little girl is going to say she’s from.  Us four Torgs, we were all born in a different state.

It’s easy for me to know where I’m from.  My parents mostly kept anchored in Winamac, so no matter how old I was—nineteen or thirty-nine—when I go visit them I am returning to the same place.  I’m certain not everyone has it this easy, and I wonder if the notion of a hometown is a problematic source of stress for some, if being from no place gives a person a different sense of identity, or if everyone has some way of figuring out where they are from.

Great New Bike Path in Winamac

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Love in the Third Grade

Love at first sight?

Between the time I was in the third grade and the time I was around thirty years old, I was the sort of person who could look across a room and think I just fell in love.  I didn’t feel this emotion was something that I could control at all, and I imagine that there are many of you reading this who think love is something that just happens; it’s an emotion you don’t have any ability to steer.  Certainly there are people who think they fall in love each time they see someone who physically catches their eye, but I wasn’t like that as a boy into my teenage and twenty-something self.  There could have been a cast of fifty beautiful and interesting women, and somehow I always managed to become secretly devoted to one.

Logansport's "Felix the Cat"

Let me jump back to third grade love:  my family moved from Logansport, Indiana—home of the Berries—to a house a mile outside of a town called Twelve Mile, so named for its relative distances from several other “bigger” towns.  Even in the third grade, being the new kid brought with it some love capital that could have been (but wasn’t) cashed in.  I fell for this girl I’ll call “Ali” right away, a pseudonym I choose after Elisabeth Shue’s character in the 1984 Karate Kid.   Something rare happened between Ali and me, and because I was just getting started with the whole business of “liking” people, I didn’t realize how rare it was.  Ali started sending me a lot of notes via that special delivery system of the artfully folded note that works its way to its intended recipient desk-to-desk, hand-by-hand across the classrooms of the world.  What was so rare about that?  Let me ask you another question as an answer:  How many of you have liked/loved someone who instantly liked/love you right back?

Elisabeth Shue as Ali in The Karate Kid

I recall Ali’s notes being of the will you be my boyfriend? / check “yes” or “no” variety.  So there I sat, in third grade love with Ali, receiving a note from her asking me to be her boyfriend.  So what did I do?  Red faced with shame—at being a coward?—I threw that note, along with the ten or so that followed, right into the garbage.  Even though the notes arrived most times in front of our whole class, I pretended as if I never received them.  Eventually, Ali stopped sending me love notes, and I vaguely remember still liking her as a seventh grader.  For at least four years, I secretly “loved” her, and I barely even spoke to her.  We may have traded very small talk a couple times in our lives, and each time I was horrendously nervous.  I always wondered if she even remembered sending me the notes, and now, looking back, I feel sure that she did.  She thought I’d rejected her, and I felt in love with her.  How does that work?

Before my eighth grade year, my family moved roughly twenty miles away to Winamac, and I still remember keeping track of Ali—of seeing her at various interschool athletic events—all the while wondering if my life would have been different if I’d only checked “yes.”  Why did it take me so long to try and love someone who would love me back?

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Image from Weddingbee