William Torgerson
Assistant Professor of Writing, Institute for Core Studies
First-Year Writing Program, Institute for Writing Studies
MFA in Creative Writing, Georgia College and State University
torgersw@stjohns.edu
For me, to live a more literate life is to live a more joyful
one, and so I design my courses with plans for the students and I
to leave them more thoughtful and enthusiastic readers, writers,
and thinkers. At least for the length of a semester, I ask my
students to be willing to call themselves writers, an identity I
hope they’ll want to keep once the course is over. It’s important
to me that the students and I first get to know each other, and
then we can begin to try and identify, develop, and promote a
complex growth of our interests. While I want to begin with who we
are individually, I also hope that we will work together to
CHALLENGE one another, each of us leaving the classroom, at least
to some extent, changed for the better. This means that we will
read and write regularly—ideally everyday—and then come together to
share our discoveries.
There’s a metaphor, given to me by a former professor, which I
use to guide my professional life: writing floats on a sea of
conversation. As a teacher who writes with the students, I look for
all the possible ways we might converse. This means we pause in
class to share our writing, we meet in small groups, we conference
together, we write one another email messages, and we communicate
virtually in social networks, course management systems, and in
blogs. Even though the opportunities to converse virtually continue
to expand, in my class we still take the time to put pen to
paper.
At the time of this writing, I’m between novels, moving away
from a completed manuscript entitled "Love on the Big Screen," the
story of a college freshman whose understanding of love is shaped
by his obsession of late-eighties romantic comedies. I’m moving
towards an idea I think of as "A Viking On The Subway," a book
which will have a real-live Viking from the turn of the first
century living in present day New York. During this between time,
I’ve worked to write and revise short stories and write an article
related to an assignment I give in my classes. In it, the students
tell a personal story layered with scholarly research. Recently, I
shared and discussed that writing project at a conference of the
New England Association of Teachers of English during a
presentation titled “How Did I Get Into My Research Paper? : The
Scholarly Personal Narrative.”