William
Torgerson
Assistant Professor of Writing, Institute for Core Studies
First-Year Writing Program, Institute for Writing Studies
torgersw@stjohns.edu
MFA in Creative Writing, Georgia College and State
University
Taking a cue from Nicholas Carr’s book The Shallows: What The
Internet is Doing to Our Brains, I ask the writers I work with to
consider a series of questions: Where are you spending your time
online? Toward what purpose? What does it mean to be digitally
literate? These are all questions students investigate as
they begin the composition course I teach and work their way to
writing what we call a “Digital Literacy Narrative.”
Conversation is a major feature in the classes I teach, and
these conversations take the form of face-to-face discussions,
hand-written notes, Tweets, annotations of texts, and through the
creation of a short documentary film. The notion of what it means
to read and write is expanded. Students have the freedom to take on
additional inquiry projects of their choosing and write a
documentary-style research text that weaves scholarly sources with
a personal story. Final writing portfolios are turned in
electronically through the Digication ePortfolio platform. It's my
hope as a writing teacher to reinvigorate intellectual curiosity
and to begin conversations that will continue long after the
semester ends.
Seven years ago, catapulted by a few great books, inspiring
teachers, and time working within the community of the National
Writing Project, I began a transformation from high school English
teacher and basketball coach to writer and professor. I write
novels, scripts,articles about the teaching of writing, and have a
“Prof. Torg” podcast which I publish to iTunes. Recently, I
finished my first film, For the Love of Books. It was accepted to
the Phenom International Film Festival. I’ll go anywhere a story
takes me.
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. In writing, I partially tried to answer the
question, How does the media we consume impact the way that we
think? My adaptation of that novel won the Grand Prize of the
Rhode Island International Screenplay Competition.
Horseshoe is my most recent novel and is set in a fictionalized
version of my hometown of 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." The work of
writers such as Richard Russo, Jane Smiley, Andre Dubus, and
Richard Ford helped me to think about the ways that I would write
my own novel about life in a small town. As someone who values
conversation, I hope you’ll take the time to get in touch. You can
write to me via Twitter @BillTorg or an email at <torgersw@stjohns.edu>.