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My annual review of Lowell political events for this past year: The nine victors in the bruising 2017 Lowell City Council race gathered at City Hall on Tuesday, January 2, 2018, take the oath of office and to elect a mayor. Bill Samaras won that contest with five votes to…
Read More »Meg Smith: Writer in Full Stride Meg Smith is in full stride as a writer. She says 2018 has been “a full and blessed” year. She published her book This Scarlet Dancing (Emu Press) and placed poems and short fiction in several literary magazines and journals, including Café Review, The Literary Hatchet, Strange…
Read More »Picking up the thread for our series of updates on writers linked to Lowell and the region. David Daniel: New Books, Flash Fiction I can’t say I discovered David Daniel in the Samuel de Champlain sense, but I found out about him through his novels, particularly The Heaven Stone (1994)…
Read More »“A Cataclysm for our District” Towards the end of Wednesday night’s review of the fiscal audit of the Lowell School Department, Connie Martin, the longest-serving current member of the Lowell School Committee said about the Lowell School Department’s fiscal mess, “This has been a cataclysm for our district.” Cataclysm is…
Read More »In Lowell literary history, the back-of-the-envelope version used to highlight Lucy Larcom, the women writers of the Lowell Offering magazine, and Jack Kerouac, along with legendary visits by Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, John Greenleaf Whittier, and H. D. Thoreau. That envelope has more names now. In our time, many…
Read More »The Christmas Fruitcake: An Ageless Tradition by Henri Marchand A note from the author: Like its subject this essay has been around, appearing first as a Sunrise radio essay on WUML at UMass Lowell, re-wrapped as a “Guest Column” piece in the Sun newspaper, and showing up on this blog…
Read More »The long-awaited outside audit by the firm of Clifton Larson Allen of the Lowell Public Schools was released late Friday night and according to an Elizabeth Dobbins story in the Lowell Sun (“Audit confirms Lowell schools’ fiscal quagmire”) it is a devastating indictment of fiscal mismanagement by the past school…
Read More »Steve O’Connor: Killin’ It with Short Stories Writer, teacher, and soccer-man Stephen O’Connor of Lowell has been killing it on the short story front for the past few years, placing 14 stories (six this year) in Lodestone Journal, Southern Pacific Journal, Dimeshow Review, The Sandy River Review, Ricky’s Backyard, The…
Read More »Here’s another literary update in my series about writers with links to Lowell and the region.–PM Michael Casey: Book Review, New Chapbook, More Mike Casey has been publishing his poems since the early 1970s. He’s a graduate of Lowell High School, UMass Lowell (physics, Lowell Tech), and the State University…
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