by William Torgerson

Welcome to Torg Stories

We at Torg Stories are excited to announce that our film On the French Broad River has been accepted to the Queens World Film Festival in New York City.

The film will screen on Sunday morning March 19th, 2017 at 10:30 a.m. in the Zukor Theater at Astoria Kaufman Studios. Click here for more information about the festival.

trailer features music from Jeremy Vogt and Erika and Shawn Wellman

The seventy-five minute documentary On the French Broad River follows the journey of we four Torgs as we raft 147 miles from Rosman, North Carolina, through class III and IV whitewater rapids, all the way to Douglass Lake in Tennessee. With environmental themes related to water quality and best management practices within watersheds, this film is about the river, the people who use it, and the social and political issues that surround it. Utilizing interviews with those connected to the environmental organizations RiverLink and MountainTrue as well as with experts in the fields of biology, wildlife conservation, and geology, this is an educational and heartwarming film for the whole family.

On the French Broad River Torgerson French Broad River Paddle Trail Asheville Rosman MountainTrue RiverLink

Charlotte, Bill, Izzy and Megan Torgerson on their Star Inflatables raft

Seven years ago I made the switch from high school English teacher and basketball coach to writer and professor. Since that time, I’ve been blessed to have been hired to teach First Year Writing courses at St. John’s University in New York. I write novels, scripts, publish a podcast, and have just sent out my first documentary film for consideration at several film festivals.

Cherokee McGhee Press has published two of my novels. The first, Love on the Big Screen, tells the story of a college freshman whose understanding of love has been shaped by late-eighties romantic comedies. In writing that book, I drew upon my early dating experiences, my time riding the bench of a small-college basketball team, and my devotion to 80s films such as Say Anything and Sixteen Candles. My adaptation of that novel won the Grand Prize of the Rhode Island International Screenplay Competition.

a scene from the novel by artist Keegan Laycock

Horseshoe is my most recent novel and is set in a fictionalized version of my hometown, Winamac, Indiana. It’s a place where everyone knows everybody else’s business. Writer Bryan Fuhurness endorsed the novel by writing, “What Sherwood Anderson would have written if he had a sense of humor.”

I ask my students to write a hybrid research paper we call a Scholarly Personal Narrative. I think of Colin Beavan’s No Impact Man and Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking as examples of this sort of text that combines a personal story with scholarly research. The students also create short documentary films, follow Tweets in their area of interest, and compose ePortfolios as their final writing project.

In order to consider my professional life, I use a metaphor gifted to me by a former professor: Writing Floats on a Sea of Conversation. Given that, I invite you to respond to anything you find here as the first lines of what could be a rewarding conversation. You can get in touch with me via Twitter @BillTorg or write me an email at William.Torgerson@gmail.com

06.29.11

by William Torgerson

Why Set a Story in a Cemetery?

I used to go sledding as a child in a cemetery where several of my family members and at least one friend are buried. That experience helped deliver to me some of the materials for my story “Suicide Hill.” In planning this story set in a cemetery, my thoughts went to my own eventual death, and I got to thinking about what sort of life I might feel satisfied having lived. Those thoughts took me to the death of my grandfather, a man I admired for his quiet personality but very action oriented brand of love. He was the sort of man who grew tomatoes and took them around to his friends, the sort of man who drove children two hours south to the hospital in Indianapolis when they would have otherwise had trouble getting there. I also thought of the lives of all the other people I knew who were buried near my grandfather.

novel-in-stories, linked, collection, short story

This Hill Gets Steeper in My Story

In writing “Suicide Hill,” I made up a character who ended up with very poor attendance at his funeral. I also placed a protagonist who’d been paid to carry the casket. Then I tried to become that character and see what he thought about the low attendance. When I finished the first draft of the story six or so years ago, I didn’t really think it much mattered if a person had anyone at their funeral or not. I mean, who cares? But I couldn’t make that “who cares” ending work for me, and I’ve found that I care very much about the way my wife and daughters would remember me should I die. I think “Suicide Hill” and my novel Love on the Big Screen both also reflect my notion that love ought to contain logical and emotional features.

“Suicide Hill” was the story I submitted to Georgia College and State University as a writing sample when I wanted to undertake a study in fiction writing. That and my teaching experiences were probably just enough to convince somebody on the school’s faculty to let me come get to work. (it sure wasn’t the GRE score).

Once in graduate school, even though the first text I had written was a novel and I wanted to revise it for my thesis, I found the courses I was taking mostly called for stories. As I went to class and taught class, I worked on my divorce novel on my own time and wrote new stories for the workshops: “Every Word I Said,” “Aloe For the Burn,” and “Friends at the Table,” were all stories I wrote during my time at Georgia College and State University in Milledgeville. Those are all stories that appear in my forthcoming collection Horseshoe.

Home of Flannery O'Connor from 1951 to 1964

As for Milledgeville and GCSU, it’s a town and college that take great pride in being the home of Flannery O’Connor, and even before I ever moved to Georgia, O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” was one of my favorites. That’s saying a lot–that she’d written a story I knew–since I wasn’t much a short story reader back then. O’Connor’s character “The Misfit” takes on nearly comic-book or super-anti-hero qualities for me, and her themes connected to guilt, violence, and Christianity are also ideas that I find myself often in conversation with. I’d say they are some of the major themes in the Horseshoe collection.

06.22.11

by William Torgerson

Prof. Torg’s take on Jennifer Egan’s A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD

If you have a Facebook page, own one of the latest cell phones, blog, or tweet, then you ought to at least check out chapter 13 in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad. In the following quote from the last chapter, a once big-time music executive laments about the state of the business. Feel free to substitute ART in the place of MUSIC. Here’s Bennie:

“The problem is,” Bennie went on, “it’s not about sound anymore. It’s not about music. It’s about reach. That’s the bitter pill I had to swallow” (page 312).

Whose taste in art is for sale?

So when Bennie says “reach,” he’s talking Tweets, he’s talking Facebook Friends, and he’s talking hits on somebody’s blog. The last chapter takes place in the future—and she could just almost be talking about right now—we all have to wonder if a book or album or any kind of art is really good or it’s just being promoted very well. What is the Tweeter getting paid to say that this new artist is the next Bob Dylan? What perks or gifts have been sent the book blogger’s way? I just attended a BEA blogging panel where there was talk of ethics in the blogging world.

It may or may not have occurred to you that a novel can pay-off in various ways: you can be made to feel as if you get to know the characters like people, the text can make you think, cause you to believe you are getting smarter, or make you bawl your eyes out or want to break stuff. Another pleasing feature of a text can be the language, the words the writer chooses and the ways that the writer puts the words together in the form of sentences. Egan’s text has that feature. There are sentences beyond this one that would make for better examples of word choice but there are some original choices here—prewallet, overhandled, Sow’s Ear—and the clever detail of the guy who drinks flakes of gold. An expensive habit, especially these days when an ounce of the stuff would cost over $1500. This quote comes from the first story (notice also that it is a long sentence, not an always easy thing to pull off) when Sasha remembers stealing a wallet from a woman in the restroom while she was on a date. We’ll also hear about Bennie here and we get to see him in the stories that follow. He’s worth meeting. Now here’s Egan’s sentence:

“Prewallet, Sasha had been in the grip of a dire evening: lame date (yet another) brooding behind dark bangs, sometimes glancing at the flat-screen TV, where a Jets game seemed to interest him more than Sasha’s admittedly overhandled tales of Bennie Salazar, her old boss, who was famous for founding the Sow’s Ear record label and who also (Sasha happened to know) sprinkled gold flakes into his coffee—as an aphrodisiac, she suspected—and sprayed pesticides in his armpits.”

I tore that brown thing out on the side and used it as a bookmark.

This is a novel-in-stories, and I loved the first two. I moved very logically with Sasha the kleptomaniac to her once boss Bennie in the second story who drinks the gold flakes and picks up his son from a previous marriage. Most of the characters in the book are connected to the music business. Egan almost lost me on the third story which takes place on an African Safari. I felt internally frustrated as I was reading and trying to link each new story to the ones which had come before it. On page eighty-seven, I wrote in the margins: “I don’t know what the hell is going on or where I am.”

I gave up on trying to connect the stories and just tried to live in each one as a separate world. I’d say this reading tactic helped, but really I think what happened is the stories got more interesting. There were many good stories in a row and then on page two hundred and eight, I knew right where I was. The stories were puzzling together. I could see where all the pieces might go. And then Chapter 12 is a Power-Point slide journal. I don’t generally go for the story that could be called gimmicky.

I was just at a Writers Conference at Wesleyan University in Connecticut and most of the table moaned when I held up the book and showed off some of the slides. One student is doing an MFA graphic novel thesis. Suddenly, she was more interested in the book, and another guy at the table said, “I’ll never read a story like that.”

Fine, readers have their tastes I guess. For me, Egan and The Goon Squad had won me over by the time the Power Point came up. By the fifth slide I was laughing and my wife was wondering what was up. It’s great the way I was taught by the text how to read it. I say Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad is one you ought to read if you’ve got grown up and thinking tastes in reading. I do.

Citation Information:

Egan, Jennifer. A Visit From the Goon Squad. New York: Anchor Books, 2011. Print.

Drop me a note if you want:

william.torgerson (at) gmail.com

06.15.11

by William Torgerson

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.