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We’re re-introducing Marie Louise St. Onge to our readers. She grew up in Lowell’s Franco-American community and lives in Maine now. Marie Louise is a co-author of French Class: French Canadian-American Writings on Identity, Culture, and Place (Loom Press, 1999) and lead editor of Ad Hoc Monadnock: A Literary Anthology…
Read More »IN ST. PATRICK’S by Stephen O’Connor . “Do you believe in ghosts?” his wife had once asked. “Oh yes,” he answered, “ghosts are everywhere.” The empty church is full of ghosts. They huddle in the pews, immigrants whispering fervent prayers and American-born families who had inherited the faith of their…
Read More »We are introducing a writer who has not appeared on this blog. Joe Blair lives in Iowa with his wife, Deb, and family. He grew up in Westford, Mass., and studied literature and writing at UMass Lowell, later earning an MFA in nonfiction at the University of Iowa. This essay…
Read More »Our new contributor Frank Wagner from Texas has a poem about neighborhood destruction, a subject familiar to anyone in Lowell who knows what happened in the Market Street Greek-American enclave in the Acre in the 1930s, Little Canada in the 1960s, and the Hale-Howard district in the late ’60s/early ’70s.…
Read More »We’re sharing some poems by blog contributor Chath pierSath—from his travel diary in Cambodia where he has been for a few months. He often posts multiple times a day from cities and villages in his native country, composing spontaneously and documenting what he thinks and feels. His poems are raw,…
Read More »We have a new poem by Tom Sexton, an occasional contributor to this blog–and regular reader of what we post here. We had Linda Hoffman’s apple orchard essay this week. So, why not blackberries . . . and fire ants? Tom and his wife Sharyn live part of the year…
Read More »The Scent of Apples Fades By Linda Hoffman Linda Hoffman, a nationally recognized artist, is the orchardist at Old Frog Pond Farm & Studio in Harvard, Mass. A strong advocate for sustainable agricultural practices, she contributed this essay to our blog as New England orchardists face increasing pressures to grow…
Read More »Susan April, a writer in the “Literary Lowell +” catalogue on the home page of this blog (top right), sent us these compositions about three diners in Lowell. Here’s her profile in our catalogue. Susan says she grew up in Lowell in Jack Kerouac’s shadow: “My father went to…
Read More »This essay from the New York Times explains clearly what is going on with the fevered support for President Trump by his core supporters, no matter how hard he tries to turn the presidency into a dictatorship. They want him to keep trying. The all-powerful leader at the top of…
Read More »We’ve been posting this brief Christmas essay long enough that it has become a tradition on the blog, along with Henri Marchand’s essay about making fruitcake for the holidays. The piles and bags of oranges are prominent in the produce sections of local supermarkets this month. If you have your…
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