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The annual Lowell Celebrates Kerouac! literary festival is coming up, October 5-9. Here’s the schedule of events. My writing colleague from Somerville, Mass., Doug Holder, sent us this poem by his fellow faculty member at Endicott College, Dan Sklar, who teaches creative writing. Dan’s latest book, Flying Cats, Actually Swooping, was published…
Read More »This past weekend’s inaugural Creaticity Festival on Market Street got me thinking about civic events in Lowell in the past. That got me digging into the archives where I found a schedule of performances in Lowell during the summer of 1990. Here they are: Mondays – Classic Car-Nite with the…
Read More »What follows is another excerpt from Charlie Gargiulo’s memoir “Farewell, Little Canada,” in which he describes growing up in tumultuous times in the mostly French Canadian-American neighborhood that once existed close to the big bend in the Merrimack River. This is the second excerpt published on this blog, which we…
Read More »Why are reporters from the N.Y. Times and other media outlets using the term “left-wing” to describe people who oppose racists of all kinds, Nazis, anti-Semites, anti-LGBTQs, christian fascists, and other hate-mongers? Isn’t it the American way to denounce these forms of inhumanity? Isn’t the American creed about pursuing liberty,…
Read More »The following is an excerpt from Charlie Gargiulo’s memoir about growing up in Lowell’s Little Canada neighborhood in the 1960s during the time when political leaders had targeted the area for wholesale destruction in service of an economic redevelopment policy fueled by government money. The process was called Urban Renewal,…
Read More »Dave Perry walked around his neighborhood a couple of nights ago and wrote this after he got back home. Our readers may know him as a music journalist and/or the guy who runs Vinyl Destination record shop in Mill No. 5 on Jackson Street in Lowell. He’s also a senior…
Read More »Book launching for HISTORY AS IT HAPPENS: Citizen Bloggers in Lowell, Mass. Saturday, August 5, 2017, 11:30 am to 1:30 pm, at Lowell Telecommunications Corp., 246 Market St, Market Mills, Downtown Lowell. The book has writing and pictures from the first ten years (2007-16) of the RichardHowe.com blog. Forty contributors…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. History is often best revealed through the personal stories and relationships of individuals. So it is with these non-fiction books I’ve read of late. An Invisible Thread is a deeply personal memoir of two lives brought together by…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. On a rainy October-like day, there’s nothing like settling in with good fiction to escape from the Trumpian travails of our time. Here, in no particular order, are some of the books I’ve been reading over the past…
Read More »We have a new poem from Tom Sexton today, which he sent from his home in Alaska. In this new composition Tom recreates an extended moment in his Lowell youth, reflecting on a kind of confusion most of us have experienced. The details are just right in this self-portrait of…
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