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Here’s a story, a memory from my early days in Dracut, Mass. When I was growing up, high-speed aircraft often broke the sound barrier even over residential areas. The enormous boom results from a massive shock wave caused by the aircraft moving faster than the speed of sound. This is…
Read More »While I was born in Lowell, I grew up next door in the town of Dracut, the only place in America with that name, derived from a Draycot in England. Keeping the “y” in the name would have ensured that people know how to pronounce it. This woodsy land was…
Read More »With the annual Lowell area Franco-American week celebration coming up later this month, this seemed to be a good time to re-run this brief essay. There are two million descendants of French-Canadian immigrants in New England. In 2020, I was asked by the hosts of the French-Canadian Legacy Podcast in…
Read More »Ann Fox Chandonnet In recent years, I have been able to connect with the creative world of my Lowell State / Class of 1964 classmate writer/ poet Ann Fox Chandonnet, through her editor at Loom Press – my longtime friend and colleague Paul Marion. Connections were hit and miss and…
Read More »Eliot Church at South Common (Wikimedia photo) Survey Team With its spire ringed in scaffolding, the Eliot Church on the rim of the South Common in Lowell, Mass., looks like a church in Dresden, Germany, shown yesterday on the TV news, the spire there circled with staging from which workers…
Read More »Olympia restaurant by Michael Casey here with a high school friend Panos and the restaurant is in the Greek neighborhood in Lowell and in a far corner are two elderly ladies Panos excuses himself and goes to say hello to these homegirls and the ladies eventually recognize him as…
Read More »Poet Maggie Dietz of UMass Lowell In her weekly Substack newsletter, ‘New England Literary News,’ writer Nina MacLaughlin shares her view of a new collection of poems by Maggie Dietz of the UMass Lowell Dept. of English. Readers can subscribe to New England Literary News here. Here is the brief…
Read More »Born in Lowell, poet Matt W. Miller has published several award-winning collections of poetry. He lives with his family in southern New Hampshire. The prestigious journal Tupelo Quarterly features new work by Matt in the current issue. Here’s the link to the page (note the small arrows to advance to…
Read More »This prose poem appears in my book What Is the City? (2006), which is out of print but sometimes available in used condition on internet sites. Jackie Brady was a champion boxer in Lowell, Mass., in the 1960s. The local scene from the 1980s described here predates the easing of…
Read More »New poem with Lowell setting in the latest issue of The Café Review in Portland, Maine, which has been around for a long time. I have three poems in this issue, and have been in the magazine previously. Kudos to them for keeping the magazine alive. The CR has interviews,…
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