RichardHowe.com – Voices from Lowell & Beyond

Lowell Cemetery Tours postponed

Due to the coming wind and rain storm, this weekend’s tours of Lowell Cemetery have been rescheduled to Saturday, October 3, 2026, and Sunday, October 4, 2026. Both tours begin at 10 a.m. from the Lawrence Street Gate.

‘Storrow Drive,” New Novel by Jay Atkinson

Jay Atkinson’s Novel ‘Storrow Drive’ Is Getting Pulled Over by Readers

I’m always glad to see a new book by my Merrimack Valley Conference literary comrade Jay Atkinson, in his case a former Ranger from Methuen High School who was a scholar-athlete in college in Nova Scotia. Jay is still in the area and teaches at Boston University. He has since written a gazillion words in five narrative nonfiction books and five works of fiction. Two of his books made bestseller lists, Ice Time (about hometown hockey) and Legends of Winter Hill (Boston crime tales). For his colonial-era account of Haverhill’s Hannah Duston in Massacre on the Merrimack, the intrepid author got into the river to make it more real. Movie rights operators have been sniffing around his bookshelf for a while.

In the new book, Jay returns to the dodgy corners of Boston with gritty investigative reporter Joe Dolan deciphering mysteries and chasing juicy stories and juicier characters, both cops and robbers–or worse. Chuck Hogan, author of The Town (you remember the story set in Charlestown and movie with Ben Affleck and the weird nun masks)–Chuck Hogan mentions Dolan in the same breath as Robert B. Parker’s private eye Spenser as a memorable Boston character.

Prize-winning journalist Lou Ureneck gives readers a head’s up about what to expect on the Boston scene in his review: “It’s definitely not the Freedom Trail.”

If we’ve been in Greater Boston, we’ve all negotiated the real Storrow Drive, which is still a codeword for stall-and-crawl at rush hour and rates that label from traffic helicopter jockeys on AM radio. The traffic in Jay’s Storrow Drive is more in the drug category. But even with the serious stuff there’s comic relief, so don’t worry about relentless darkness here.

If you are in Lowell, you might run into Jay at the Old Court, Brew’d Awakening, Viet-Thai and Life Alive restaurants, or at Kerouac’s marker in Edson Cemetery. Let him know you read his books, any one of them.

Lowell Cemetery tours postponed

Due to the coming wind and rain storm, this weekend’s tours of Lowell Cemetery have been rescheduled to Saturday, October 3, 2026, and Sunday, October 4, 2026. Both tours begin at 10 a.m. from the Lawrence Street Gate.

Words

Words

By Leo Racicot

“Expert use of language is to me a perpetual joy.”  Noel Coward

Ever since when in first grade I intuited the Beatrix Potter sentence Mrs. Hare printed on the blackboard, I’ve felt words are pearls of great value. There are writers whose belief is the opposite. The renowned author, Edmund White told me he thought words are a dime a dozen. When working a draft, he thought nothing of slashing beautifully wrought paragraphs if he decided they didn’t contribute to the final product. But that was Ed.

I’ve always felt grateful that I am able to express myself, my feelings, my life stories with words. Words have been there for me when friends weren’t, when health wasn’t, when faith wasn’t.

Words have led me to work with some of the men and women of the Golden Age of Publishing: William Shawn at The New Yorker, the wonderful Stewart Brand and Art Kleiner at Coevolution Quarterly, wise Jean Burden at Yankee Magazine, gentle Winston Leyland at Gay Sunshine Journal. For a young man, it was a thrill seeing my work appear alongside the work of Ken Kesey, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Harold Norse, E.B. White. And working with and being befriended by writers like Edmund White and M.F.K. Fisher was an unexpected dream come true.

And when at Franco American school, principal Sister Gilberte Durette asked me to design and implement the school’s middle school Advanced Reading class, I jumped at the chance. My belief has been that if a student wants to become a good writer, she/he should read, read, read. Read the masters of the form but also

read anything they can get their hands on. I had a student, Chris Vavra, not too keen on traditional books but loved comic books, as what red-blooded American boy didn’t in those days? My encouragement of this passion was looked down upon by school higher-ups but in his high school entrance exams, Chris scored highest in reading.

For our advanced group, we were given our own classroom, a cubby tucked away between the first and second floors, a reading aerie of sorts; the kids thought of it as a special place and I came to think so, too. On the walls, I hung photos of world-famous authors and encouraged members of the class to bring in pictures of their favorites so we could add them to our writers wall.  I hoped to convey to students that words are a boundless frontier. As with music, words can be sculpted into infinite arrangements. There is no end to the pleasures they bring.

The first thing I wrote was a poem about the assassination of John Kennedy. I, along with others of my generation, was shattered by the public murder of that beloved man, sought ways to assuage my deep sorrow. I composed a poem in commemoration, the stanzas of which, to my surprise, rhymed nicely. I was ten years old in fifth grade and Mrs. Dalton put the poem in the class newspaper. From then on, I wanted to be a writer and work with words.

It wasn’t until the early 1980s that I made any headway; the editors of Coevolution Quarterly liked my essay about a high school/college chum titled, Rachelann: A Remembrance. I actually got paid for it, a real thrill that encouraged me to keep going. I’m still able to see the looks of sheer delight on the faces of a small group of Saint Patrick’s third graders I was tutoring in reading as the rhyming words hearing their first poems struck their ears with a joy so innocent, so new, they giggled in unison.

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A working lunch with Edmund White

Advanced reading classroom

Eric LeMay

Jean Burden

MFK Fisher in her kitchen

My reading tutorial group

President Kennedy

Stewart Brand

Winston Leyland