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I’m cross-posting this from the blog on my paulmarion.com website. This is a sidebar piece from my book Mill Power: The Origin and Impact of Lowell National Historical Park (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014). I worked in Lowell for decades, including many years when I helped to create the national park. Everybody in…
Read More »This is cross-posted from my personal blog at paulmarion.com. I’m happy to see the landscape and public art improvements at Lucy Larcom Park, where artist Ellen Rothenberg in her artwork titled Industry, Not Servitude made permanent or at least pretty indestructible selected words, lines, and phrases by women writers of…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Every year at this time I share books that that may interest my readers. What I have discovered in year two of the Trump administration is how I often have I sought escape into fiction, though it is…
Read More »Not exactly a scoop, but a funny coincidence at least. Surprise of the day: on Boston.com the Boston Globe posted a preview of this coming Sunday’s Globe Magazine photo-essay and article by Peter Simon about two communes in Vermont that rose up in the late 1960s and lasted about two…
Read More »Raymond Mungo is a writer whose books should be more familiar than they are to readers in the Merrimack Valley. He has lived in Southern California for many years, but he was born in Lawrence and graduated from Boston University, where he gained national attention as the politically radical editor…
Read More »An occasional contributor to our blog, John Wooding is familiar to many people in the city for his work at UMass Lowell and in the community. He recently retired from his position as a professor of political science. He is a former provost (academic vice president) on campus. John continues…
Read More »Web photo courtesy of commons.wikimedia.org One of midsummer’s visual signals in the Merrimack Valley is purple loosestrife. While some people frown upon its spread as an invasive species, I’ve always enjoyed the distinctive color in the landscape at this time of year. The following is an essay that is returning…
Read More »Next Monday marks the 30th anniversary of the dedication of the Jack Kerouac Commemorative in Kerouac Park on Bridge and French streets. On the dedication day, some 200 people gathered for the celebration, joined by journalists from the Sun, Boston Globe, New York Times, New Yorker magazine, CBS-News TV, and international…
Read More »I am introducing a new writer to our blog readers. He’s not new to writing, but we haven’t featured his work here before. I met Mike McCormick through Tom Sexton, one of our regular far-flung contributors who is a mutual friend. That would be Tom Sexton, the poet and retired…
Read More »On a bright yellow day in new-minted May, my phys ed class and I are out for a walk. The class is actually called Mind and Motion, with some idea that the two go together. The small urban high school where I teach has no athletic facilities—no courts, no playing…
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