Paolo Aritola

Paolo Aloysius Francis Artiola (born August 24, 1988), known as p.Aritola, or Paolo Aritola, is a short story writer, poet and political activist born in Santa Rosa, California. His work encourages looking at the colorful essence of reality and, despite imaginative themes, advocates an austere view of reality, "in this, in a study of real, we find ourselves lost in the surreal - which is truth revealing itself". Little known for his works, Paolo Aritola is part of an underground movement in New York City of self-described "Analytics" forcing culture and counter-culture to re-evaluate the 'progress' of the new millennium.
While raised in the small town of Healdsburg, California, Paolo Aritola lost his father as an infant to a heart attack and his mother as a teenager to pancreas cancer. After disputes with his stepfather, he was removed from school and 'escorted', at his stepfather's behest, to a wilderness camp in the Great Basin Desert of Idaho. After a week Paolo ran away but arrested only a day later wandering down a road a mile from a freeway. Paolo was transferred to a short term psychiatric ward in Twin Falls then to a long term ward in Boise, Idaho after claiming that he had suffered 'visions' in the desert.
In the lockdown adolescent psychiatric ward of Intermountain Hospital, he reconnected to a half-sister and she petitioned for Paolo's custody. After a lawyer deemed the conditions in his stepfather's house unfit, the half-sister and husband were given custody. Paolo moved into his sister's house in Pasadena, California at the age of 16 where he finished high school. Enrolling in the Integral Program at Saint Mary's College of California in 2006, Paolo Aritola became interested in philosophy and enrolled in graduate classes of fiction and poetry. Here he met contemporary writers and professors Brenda Hillman and Lysley Tenorio. Futhermore, he came into contact with the works of Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Ellison, Roethke, Rimbaud, Salinger, Joyce, Neruda, Borges, Dickinson...etc. He contributed to the college newspaper and literary magazines . Despite a high school career tattered with failed classes and low grades, Paolo excelled in college graduating with high honors.
Ending a brief interlude of applying to law schools by withdrawing his applications, in 2011 he moved to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil where he worked at an orphanage, Casa Do Caminho, in the small town of Xerem, Brazil for a year. Learning Brazilian Portuguese and exposed to other ex-patriates, including a French astrophysicist and English 'squatter', he continued to form his ideas of reality, dreams, politics, values and divinity. During this time, he also began working on a collection of short stories under the title of "An Aritola Quintet". After a year, however, the most influential source of his thinking came from his work and relationships with the Brazilians and children - their ability to forgive, redemptive nature and openness to feel new forms of malleable reality.
In 2012, Paolo returned to the United States to live in New York City. He moved to Bushwick, Brooklyn to be near an ex-lover and found a job bagging groceries. A short while later, he was let go after an altercation with another employee and returned to California with his grandmother. Back at home, he found a job as a barista and continued writing a series of short stories that would eventually come to be known as "The Analytics" but was initially read in parts around Brooklyn as the "Aritola Quintet" and a collection of villanelles - villanelles by p.Aritola.
After his grandmother had a stroke, to whom he was bonded, he sold her house, moved her closer to siblings and returned to New York City to teach for a non-profit, Teach For America. Working in the Bronx at a public school and living in East Harlem working on a novel under the title, The Raez Family Tragedy, Paolo Aritola began handing out paper copies of his stories and poems for change at subway stops.

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