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...