16-1 August Wilson

August Wilson was a major figure in American drama of the last two decades of the twenty century, and the beginning of the twenty- first century. Wilson was one of seven American authors to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Wilson was fourth of six children. Wilson was born and grew up in Pittsburg Pennsylvania which has been his central place of his plays. The play “Fences” was a great story that I really enjoyed reading. The story starts out with the main character talking and drinking with one of his buddies from work and automatically some sort of racial conflict is brought into the story. The main character is talking about how the white workers are the ones that get to drive the garbage trucks  and the blacks have to load them These is already one thing that hints towards the enormous amount of racial accountability in this play. We soon find out that there are many very important characters in this story, and that the main character, Troy, is having an affair with another woman and that him and the other woman have a child but the mother dies in birth. The younger of the two sons was very afraid of his father and angry at him at the same time. The father died when the daughter from the affair was seven years old. The younger son was practically forced by his mom to stay for the funeral and she was just there because she had no choice. At the end of the story everybody stayed for his funeral. In the end he was surrounded by his whole family, but he still died lonely and alone.

15-4 Billy Collins

Billy Collins was born in New York City in 1941. He is the author of several books of poetry. Collins got his PhD in Romantic poetry from the University of California. Collins taught at Lehman College. His poetry Books is about how the books in the library come alive on the college campus. Each book has a coat that is the cover of the book. The authors talk to each other and some family is beside each other. These books speak their own language to each other. His mother reads to him and the characters and places come to life. Within the walls rain soaks New England or standing in a trench coat. The books can take someone to places they haven’t been before anything is possible. We read these books that after we finish is only crumbs on the page that makes a trail. We read in circles looking for more light until the words leave a trail of crumbs.  The birds eat the crumbs that we have left behind from reading the book. We have to listen hard to hear the brother and sister talking to each other as they recede to the woods. The books have come a live but one must listen real close to hear what the books are saying to one another. We don’t hear what the books have to offer and the places they can take us. I enjoyed this poem it made a lot of sense when you think about all those books and shelves full of authors talking to each other. Some kin to each other some not but as the words a read they fall from the pages like crumbs that the birds pick up and eat. When we are done with them just as we are the books, some will never be picked up again but some will.

15-3 15-3 Bobbie Ann Manson

Bobbie Ann Mason writes about blue-collar people in small town and just your normal everyday houses for the average families. Clerk stores workers, waitresses and truck drivers. Men and women who “believe” in progress and are more optimistic in life and the lessons they have learned. She didn’t like television. She believed that it was a waste and was only empty hours. Bobbie grew up in Kentucky. She learned about and met many small-town working people and the culture surrounding her. She spent a lot of time on the farm while growing up in Kentucky. “Shiloh” by Bobbie Ann Mason is a story about two common everyday people, Leroy and Norma Jean. Leroy and Norma are husband and wife, he works as a truck driver, and Norma Jean works at the Rexall drugstore. Three months earlier Leroy was hurt in a highway accident that left his leg in pretty bad shape. He can no longer drive his bid rig, so he has been staying at home recuperating. The accident scared him so bad that he’s not really sure that he wants to drive anymore. Leroy like most people who work away from home a lot, started seeing his life and his wife differently. He realized that he had let a lot of things pass him by very quickly while he was out on the long hauls. His wife has been use to him being gone for all these years and it seems that now that Leroy is home he is getting on Norma Jean’s nerves. Leroy is sitting around the house smoking pot and building things with notched popsicle sticks, he tells Norma Jean that he wants to build her a log cabin, she tells him that none of the new subdivisions in their town is going to allow a cabin to be built in them he rides around town and realizes that this is true.Leroy starts to see his wife in a different light, he realizes how much he loves her, but Norma Jean seems to be distant and indifferent towards her husband. She is getting in shape by working out and she is attending classes at college trying to better her career path. Norma Jean’s mother is very judgmental of Norma. She feels as if her mother punishes her when she catches her doing something she thinks she shouldn’t be doing, like smoking. Norma Jean is tired of her life, she wants something different. Leroy knows in his heart that something is different about his wife. He mentions this to him mother-in-law that he thinks their trouble at home and she suggest that he take Norma Jean to Shiloh a small town a few hour up the road from their house. While they are visiting, Shiloh, Norma Jean tells Leroy she wants a divorce. I think he is shocked and in disbelief.

15-2 Amy Tan

Amy’s parents emigrated from China to California. Amy was born in California and has spent most of her life there. She graduated from college in 1973. She spends three years in postgraduate study and then worked as a reporter, then an editor and as a technical writer for computer companies. She published “The Joy Luck Club” in 1989. I remember this! I think it was a series when I was a child that I read after buying it at the book store at school. These were stories of Chinese women and their Chinese American daughters.

The story Half and Half” by Amy Tan is the story of a Chinese girl, Rose, who lived in America with her mother, father and her six siblings, four brothers and two sisters. Her parents had moved to America from China and had done very well for themselves. Since being in The US they had managed to buy a house in the Sunset district and had been blessed with seven children. Mrs. Hsu, the mother, was a religious person. She attended First Chinese Baptist Church every Sunday, but a day at the beach with her family changed all of her feelings about faith. The entire Hsu family went to the beach to play in the water, fish and just have a wonderful time. The fun filled day turned tragic when Rose, who was responsible for watching her youngest brother, Bing, took her eyes of him for one second and he fell into the ocean and drown. That was the day Mrs. Hsu lost her faith, she and Rose went back to the beach the next day, where she talked to God and threw her mother’s ring in to the water as payment trying to get Bing back. She felt she had been faithful and good and she wanted God to return her son for her servitude to him. When Bing did not return she lost faith sticking her bible under the table leg in her kitchen. This is the day that Rose learned about fate. Twenty years later Rose is sitting in her mother’s house and she going to tell her that she and her American husband Ted, the dermatologist, are going to get a divorce. During their marriage Ted has always taken the lead, and Rose just agreed to whatever he wanted to do. I don’t think she ever forgave herself for her brother’s death, she felt as though she didn’t make a good decision on the beach that day and she is ok with Ted making all the moves and her following his lead in their marriage.
Ted has a patient who has a bad experience after a medical procedure and the patient sues him, the wind is knocked out of his sails, he no longer believes in himself. Ted wants Rose to now make the decisions in their marriage and this has cause an unbelievable strain in the relationship. Her mother tells her that she has been told what the problem in the marriage is and now she must fix it. She must start thinking for herself!! She realizes that fate is shaped by half expectation, and half by inattention. She gets her mother’s bible out from under the table leg, in the section where you list Deaths in the family she sees Bing Hsu in erasable ink.

15-1 Alice Walker

Alice Walker was born in Georgia she was one of eight kids from a poverty stricken sharecropper’s family. Her parents supported her writing and after graduating top of her class she got a scholarship to go to college. Her most known work was the Color Purple which has been made into movies and plays. Everyday Use was a good story\that opens with the mother day dreaming of being on a talk show and meeting her daughter again. She wants her daughter to be like her thin, witty, and expressive. But in actually she is a heavy woman that does best at hard labor. She sees how important hard work is and doesn’t have time for fillies ‘She has two daughters Maggie and Dee Several years ago their home had burned down and Maggie one of the daughters hands and arms were burnt badly. Dee the other sister left and said she wouldn’t be back or bring her friends to the little house they lived in after the fire. Maggie feel like she is less of a person because of the way Dee treats her. Maggie see’s Dee as being very pretty and smart. But Dee is very snobby to her family when she returns she brings a man that she might be married too. Dee has changed her name to Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo because she thinks the name is better than the one she was born with. They start taking things from the house saying where they can use it in their home. She gathers quilts and other things. The quilts were to be Maggie’s handed down from the family. Dee says Maggie will just mess them up and they are not for everyday use. Dee sees the things as being something to be put into a museum and not something to use everyday. Maggie and Dee’s mother grabs the quilts from Dee and gives them back to Maggie; her mother knows that Maggie will take care of them and she will cherish and appreciate them.

14-3 Nikki Giovanni’s Poetry

Giovanni’s Poetry Rosa is about black childhood. Black love is black wealth.  They see love being very powerful and they are rich not from money or material things, but from love from each family member. People shouldn’t feel sorry for the black kids. They have love from their mom even though their dad is a heavy drinker. They had good holidays with their family, even birthdays were good. People that had become famous and moved from the poverty stricken places didn’t talk of how happy they were as a child, even though they didn’t have in-door toilets. Basically some people don’t for get where they came from, however some people do. Giovanni doesn’t look at life as being sad and wants the white people not to write of their bad times because they were quite happy. Barbecue was fixed in a large tub for the people of Chicago, but the others took baths in the same tub where the water felt really good to a kid. Their father had to sell his stock and it was hard for their mom to see her dreams be sold with them. I guess it makes you think was it because their farther drunk so much and how they also fought. I am not Lonely was a very good poem. The girl wasn’t scared as she had been. No bad dreams as she once use to have. I would say the girl has turned into a woman. Some one she used to know and sleep with was in her bed and she thought they were going to leave and after they did she got use to her big bed and being all alone. She had a feeling they would leave and they did, which she has adapted to be a lone in her big bed to roll around in all by her-self.

14-2 Tillie Olson

Tillie Olson has gained wide critical attention as a prose stylist and spokeswomen for the poor, the oppressed, and the despised people of America.  She was born in Nebraska to Russian immigrant parents. Olson’s story of I Stand Here Ironing is a story written from a mother’s point of view of her troubled daughter Emily. Her mother has just gotten a call from the girl’s school, which they expressed that she “needs help”; her mother looks back on how she has raised her. As her mother thinks about this she thinks how she  put so much into her daughter when she was younger.Her mother looking back feels what every mother thinks of their kid what all mother feel about their child that they are beautiful, because we love them. The bubbles remind her of how she spit bubbles and cooing.The babies feet and hands and overalls are things that she pictures and remebers of her as a baby.she talks about Emily as in ecstacy which is a big change from her attitude throughout the story.her mother looks back and sees that she can’t spend the time and care for her, because her husband has left them and she has to support them by working.The woman downstairs don’t spend the time with her as she would or any mother to a child would.She has looked for her husband and he didn’t want to see his family suffer eventhough he knew they would but he wouldn’t be there to actually see the poverty. He was a very selfish person that must have been out of sight out of mind kind of person. Her being a young mother trying to work and raise a child by herself wasn’t easy. Now she looks back and sees that while she was trying to make a living to care for her she slipped through without what her mother thought she needed. I see her mother feeling as though she has failed not only her daughter but her self when she was only trying to support them.