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Historian Paul Hudon is the author The Valley & Its Peoples: An Illustrated History of the Lower Merrimack and a collection of poems, All in Good Time. A former college professor and museum curator, he lives in Lowell. For nine weeks he has been sending his diary entries to the…
Read More »Eagle River Virus By Mike McCormick I’m sitting on my deck listening to the ebullient calls of ruby-crowned kinglets as they flit from branch to branch high atop birch and spruce trees. My wife Katy is transplanting geraniums from inside our arctic entry room to outdoor flower boxes. We are…
Read More »Diary in the Time of Coronavirus (8) by Paul Hudon May 31 In Consciousness, his only volume of memoirs, John Updike proposes two life-defining questions. First, Why me? Second, Why here? Identity and place. He paired the right questions, only, being Updike, he put them back to front. Place comes first…
Read More »My co-blogger Marie Sweeney writes about making slumgullion at home. The first time I read that word I knew I had to work it in to a poem. Turns out the dish she makes (and a lot of us make) has a bunch of names. I only knew it as…
Read More »Diary in the Time of Coronavirus (7) by Paul Hudon 24 May, 2020 ‘The fitful apprehension of history’ is a phrase I picked up four years ago come September. Apparently it was coined by Fredric Jameson, “an American Marxist philosopher.” This poses a problem because the phrase could be very…
Read More »Diary in the Time of Coronavirus (6) by Paul Hudon 17 May Today would be Bob’s 95th birthday, my aforementioned brother, the navy guy. He died in November 2013, ‘’in the 89th year of his age.’’ I prefer that antique way of telling a person’s age. It’s more accurate because…
Read More »Isolation Scenes IV By Doug Sparks One: While driving the backroads of Groton, I waited for a turkey vulture to clear the road. He had been eating the guts of a turtle, whose shell was shimmering in the sun’s radiance. The vulture flew to the top of a nearby tree…
Read More »With wry humour, Irish novelist Alan McMonagle writes of the challenges of living through COVID-19. EVEN THE RAINBOWS ARE SOCIAL DISTANCING by Alan McMonagle Somewhere in Bedfordshire, England a ninety-nine-year-old man is hobbling lengths of his garden to raise money for the UK’s National Health Service, and here I am,…
Read More »Diary in the Time of Coronavirus (5) by Paul Hudon *10th May River hawk glides into view, low-flying, heading west. Spirit lifting visual context. Escape. *11th May When Death is roaming the streets of your city, can God thinking be far behind? God, the paramour, the paradox, the paradigm of…
Read More »Michael Edema Leary-Owhin is the author of Exploring the Production of Urban Space: international comparisons of three post-industrial cities (University of Chicago Press, 2016), a study of Lowell; Manchester, England; and a section of Vancouver, Canada. A pdf is available here. Michael sent us a recent set of 40 photographs…
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