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Ten years ago, my family went to Chicago to look around. We had never been there. The city made a deep impression on us, so we returned last week for another look. If anything, the latest visit topped the first one. If anyone in the Lowell, Mass., area is reading…
Read More »Jay Atkinson’s Novel ‘Storrow Drive’ Is Getting Pulled Over by Readers I’m always glad to see a new book by my Merrimack Valley Conference literary comrade Jay Atkinson, in his case a former Ranger from Methuen High School who was a scholar-athlete in college in Nova Scotia. Jay is still…
Read More »Just Sayin’—Jonathan Lemire and The Atlantic Festival in NYC What is the acronym, iykyk? But if you have not heard, this is just to say Lowell’s Jonathan Lemire (living in New York now), top-tier journalist and book-writer, regular on MSNOW’s “Morning Joe” broadcast, and staff writer at The Atlantic, which,…
Read More »Bill O’Connell is a past contributor to this blog. He is the author of the poetry collections When We Were All Still Alive and Sakonnet Point. His forthcoming book Tarifa Moon (Lost Valley Press) includes poems drawn from recent European travel along with family and neighborhood stories. He lives in…
Read More »News from Jean-Christophe Cloutier, Graduate Chair, Penn English, Associate Professor of English & Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania, www.jccloutier.com J-C Cloutier is the translator of The Unknown Kerouac: Rare, Unpublished, & Newly Translated Writings by Jack Kerouac, edited by Todd Tietchen of UMass Lowell (Library of America, 2016). “Dear…
Read More »Frost Land On the small balcony with purple morning glories and magenta zinnias in pots, I see two eagles flowing west to east, lower to higher, doing whatever they do at a time like this, but definitely showing themselves off in a faded blue flannel sky with a…
Read More »My wife Rosemary and I live in a townhouse condo atop a former ski slope in Amesbury, Mass., just uphill from the compact but busy downtown. Called Powwow Hill for the original residents in this area, the 330-foot hill is crowned with a small public park and woods that…
Read More »In the August issue of The Atlantic magazine, Carol Frost has a short poem about being alive titled “The Scrubbed and Simple Moon,” which is a big deal because the magazine typically publishes one poem per issue. Twelve poems a year. I’m sure the poetry editor gets thousands of compositions…
Read More »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…
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