By the time I was halfway through college, I was a good-enough English major–and nothing more. It took no heroics to impress professors with vague ideas on Milton or a cranked-out analysis of The Awakening. But I was neither working hard nor a budding scholar. What’s more: I couldn’t stop wondering if any of it mattered.
As graduation loomed, my fears grew worse. In short order, I’d need to become a grownup with goals and expertise. For years, I’d kept my fears at bay by assuming I’d end up a lawyer. I’d read and write and make real money, mint my otherwise worthless skills into cold hard cash. But once I learned what I’d actually have to read and write to make that money, I felt more lost than ever.
That spring, gut-punched and listless and mad at myself, I enrolled in a course called Short Fiction, taught by the writer Randolph Thomas. The syllabus seemed familiar enough: yammer about stories, bang out papers. Another academic hoop I’d jump through with ease. But I was wrong.
That semester, forty of my fellow students and I spent three hours a week in a basement lecture hall, but as time moved, it felt more and more like Randolph and I were the only ones there. For the first time in my life, I was a real student, eager to unpack each narrative and impress my professor, but even more eager to shut up and listen. Here was a man who not only knew these stories like the Gospel, but who published stories and poems of his own, a man who wasn’t just great at his job but who seemed to find it fulfilling.
Short Fiction introduced me to Baldwin and Carver and Johnson and Ford. But it also catalyzed my life’s great realization: literature wasn’t some dead form that existed for half-assed kids to figure out like a puzzle. Literature was alive. It teemed with realer than real characters who endured the same emotions and confusions I felt so strongly back then (and still feel to this day). By the end of the course, I’d transformed from a bored twenty-year-old into a young man certain of only one thing–that if I worked hard enough, if I just kept going, I might be lucky enough to have a life where I read, write and teach others to do the same.
Twenty years have passed since I signed up for Short Fiction–years in which I failed and thrived, lost friends, got married, became a father, and gave up drinking. Years in which I felt destined for fame and then destined for poverty. Very often, usually at night, as my sweet wife snores beside me, I wonder who I’d be had I not taken Randolph’s course. I’d make more money, maybe, have more stuff. But in all my idle time, I know I’d still ask myself, over and again, does any of this really matter?
And that’s a question I haven’t asked in a long, long time.
*
William Torrey has received support from The Delaware Division of the Arts, the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. His stories and essays have appeared in The Missouri Review, Boulevard, River Teeth, The Florida Review, Colorado Review, The Beloit Fiction Journal, Longreads, The North American Review, Moon City Review, Salamander, The Southeast Review, Hobart, Washington Square, the Concho River Review, the Hawaii Review, New Madrid, and Zone 3. His work has been named a finalist for The Faulkner-Wisdom Prize, the Iron Horse Chapbook Prize in Nonfiction, and the Barry Hannah Prize in Fiction. He lives with his wife and sons in Richmond, VA and teaches writing at Hampden-Sydney College.
Regal House Publishing is proud to bring you William Torrey’s Freedom of Movement in the spring of 2027.
