Joseph Fattorusso

      Alice Walker's "Use" took a few readings from me to remember that I had read this a very long time ago, in 8th grade. Reflecting on roots has always fascinated me since I was a kid, when I saw a special on the human genome project that traced the human genetic line from the first African tribes all the way to Queens, one of the most diversified districts on earth. I couldn't imagine having a workable concept of America without understanding it in the context of the Civil War or slavery and the African American experience. Writers such as Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, W.E.B. DuBois, and Alice Walker give life to our complex heritage for current Americans.       In Alice Walker's essay “In Search of our Mother’s Gardens,” she writes on the Smithsonian's anonymous quilt, “If we could locate this ‘anonymous’ woman from Alabama, she would turn out to be one of our grandmothers.” There is a note of the ...

      Flannery O'Connor is one of my favorite writers because of her elusiveness and everything she packs into a story. Also as someone who is slow to read new writers, she's turned me onto artists like Breece D'J Pancake, a writer from a hard scrabble area of coal country, West Virginia. I love southern writers--some of my first reading memories involve Carson McCullers, "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter," thinking it interesting that I was reading her stories in Finland(where my mother is from), and that she had a story entitled "Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland," which I had yet to read.       I've always had trouble with finishing Faulkner's novels. I recently read an interview by Raymond Carver, one of my favorite short story writers, describing "Faulkner is Faulkner" in a respectful tone, who's writing style was very different than that of Carver's,  when asked to parse through meaningful American writers, "but the...

       Toni Cade Bambara’s story “The Lesson“ uses a first person narration that is refreshing to hear, since most short stories are written in the third person. One of the main details I focused on is how once at the toy store, the children feel uneasy and out of place. They’re completely stunned by the high prices(as I most certainly would be), seeing a chunk of glass that costs $480 in 1960s money, or a toy sailboat that cost $1,195!       Miss Moore seems to use the trip to showcase   how an unjust economic and social capital system creates disproportionate access for black Americans to resources, and offers education as one tool to protect themselves from the system. I can’t help bu think of Marxist theory throughout the story, and of the Harlem that Malcolm X grew to adulthood in. Civic leaders like Martin Luther King are often quoted but their socialist, economic justice perspective is often left out of school flyers and MLK day celebr...

       In simple terms I feel that “Hills like White Elephants” by Ernest Hemingway is about an unstable love affair between the woman protagonist and the young man in the story. The “American” man does not seem to want the relationship to develop into something longer than a passionate romance. A more developed relationship at the time would traditionally result in marriage and a family. When I was younger I never thought there’d be a day that I’m just a little bit older, or at least old enough where he decision to have a family becomes an issue of time. When you’re 18, it’s hard to imagine that time will start to run out.   I’m excited to be in a place in my life where I’m embarking on that journey and as a happy man. But many of my years were spent in an unbalanced place, especially when I first read this story as an 18 year old(I loved Hemingway since reading the Nick Adams stories.). Conversely, the strategic badgering of the girl to complete an abortion as...

  “Even the Sparrow finds a home, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young, at your altars, O Lord of Hosts, my King and my God.” Psalm 84:3        In her September 15th, 2020 article “The Meaning of Sparrows: Symbolism and Identification,” [ https://owlcation.com/social-sciences/The-Meaning-of-Sparrows-Identification-and-Folklore]  Jennifer Stone takes us through the long history of sparrows as a symbol in art and literature, ranging from the Bible, through Shakespeare and to modern times as “Jack Sparrow” from Pirates of the Caribbean. She notes the wide range of their symbolism: sometimes the symbol of counter culture, noting the common 18th century practice of Pirates receiving Sparrow tattoos to symbolize their disconnection from common society. In China, a sparrow flying into a home  may be a symbol of good luck in marriage, but a sparrow hitting the glass of a window and falling dead can be either a positive or negative om...