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Boarding School Blues By Louise Peloquin Ch. 15: In the Night Blanche’s vision sharpened that October Saturday. People she thought she knew by heart were no longer what-you-see-is-what-you-get. Her mother, for instance, was always in control and made lemonade out of life’s lemons. But seeing her mute and compliant with…
Read More »Last Sunday, June 27, 2021, several hundred people from across the region gathered on Market Street at the Western Canal to witness the dedication of the Philip L. Shea Bridge. The cement and steel structure that was totally rebuilt in 2019 now bears the name of the only individual to…
Read More »Stumbling Upon The Town and the City By Mike McCormick One Sunday in late April, I wandered with my friend Matt as he pointed out his favorite businesses in an upscale shopping district on Bainbridge Island, a thirty-minute ferry ride west of Seattle. As we sauntered, I remembered days during…
Read More »A Man You Don’t Meet Every Day By Stephen O’Connor “I never heard a singer as good as Liam, ever. He was the best ballad singer I ever heard in my life, and still is.” —Bob Dylan, 1986 Somewhere around 1982, not long after the noon hour on a Saturday,…
Read More »Derwin at the End of a Scribble By David Daniel He almost always came to class (maybe only because it was a place to be). He always sat in the back of the room, always with a fine-point Sharpie in hand in perpetual motion. Sometimes I would call on him:…
Read More »More than 34,000 Lowell residents voted in the November 4, 1942, state election. Besides selecting state officers and local representatives, the people of Lowell also chose by a margin of 16,477 to 14,135 to replace the existing Plan B form of government (a strong mayor and city councilors both elected…
Read More »This post originally ran on March 12, 2021, but it’s being repeated here as a reminder of the approaching contest deadline. ATLANTIC CURRENTS II Enter Your Original Writing—Compete for Cash Prizes Attention, writers! Alumni and students of UMass Lowell and University College Cork are invited to submit original prose…
Read More »Boarding School Blues By Louise Peloquin Ch. 14: Back to the Fold Mother and daughters weren’t thinking of the fleeting minutes. Instead, they were lingering at the picnic table scraping their paper cups with flat wooden spoons, extracting every last drop of melted ice cream. Maman started examining her eldest…
Read More »This poem originally appeared in Origin (Bob Arnold, editor). To Florence By Sean Casey Flossy, Florence, Mrs. MacKenzie— this is Sean Casey, son of Michael and Kathy Casey of 9 Robandy Road, your neighbor since 1984. I wanted to let you know this past Sunday, January 14, 2007, the Patriots…
Read More »In honor of Juneteenth, here are some snippets of African-American history with Lowell connections: Harry “Bucky” Lew, born in Lowell in 1884, was the first African-American to play professional basketball. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. preached in Lowell on April 12, 1953, at the First United Baptist Church on Church…
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