Meet Zuke, a college freshman whose understanding of love has been shaped by late-eighties romantic comedies, and who attends a school so strict it's against the rules to go to the movies. Zuke and his buddies, separated from the women on campus and forced to entertain themselves, form a club called the Brothers in Pursuit, which holds weekly meetings during which all the members dress in matching and embroidered boxer shorts, stand at attention to Cyndi Lauper's "True Colors," and report back to one another on their objectives: God, knowledge, compassion, and women. Love on the Big Screen is a novel of friendship, the dangers of romanticized love, the complexities of faith and real life, and what happens to one young man as he finds out that life is nothing like the movies he loves.
"Torg" to many of his friends and students, William grew up the son of two English teachers in the rural town of Winamac, Indiana where he spent most of his time playing basketball and cruising up and down the Tippecanoe River. In 1989, William began a four year stint sitting on the bench for the basketball team at Olivet Nazarene University, a school which serves as the inspiration for Love on the Big Screen's fictionalized Pison College. Upon his graduation from college, William became the head boys' basketball coach at North Miami High School in Denver, Indiana.
Following eight years of coaching and teaching in Indiana and North Carolina, William began to feel a tug toward the more peaceful and reflective life of reading and writing over the long and stressful hours of coaching. While earning a master's degree in English Education from the University of North Carolina Charlotte, Torgerson participated in a National Writing Project Summer Institute, read Stephen King's On Writing and Donald Murray's Write to Learn, and became convinced that he wanted daily writing as a part of his life.
In 2006, William graduated from Georgia College and State University in Milledgeville, home of the legendary writer Flannery O'Connor, with an M.F.A. degree in Creative Writing. William is an assistant professor in the Institute For Writing Studies at St. John's University in New York. His adaptation of Love on the Screen was awarded the Grand Prize in the Flickers Rhode Island International Screenplay Competition. In addition to novels and screenplays, William writes short stories and articles on teaching and writing, and his work has appeared most recently in the University of Maryland's Sakura, Old Dominion University's Barely South Review, and NYU's interdisciplinary journal Anamesa. You can find William on Facebook as "Bill Torgerson" or on his "William Torgerson and Love on the Big Screen" page.
