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We’ve been posting my 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 groceries and supermarkets this month. If you…
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 »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…
Read More »Febo: Choosing Joy I met Anthony Febo or Febo, as he is known professionally, (“Yes, it’s very Bono, Madonna, Seal of me,” he said when I asked his preference for a name in this update about his work.)—well, I met Febo in Lowell, Mass., when performance poetry/slam poetry/spoken word was…
Read More »Jacquelyn Malone: New Poems, Broadside Contest Winner The first time I read Jacquelyn Malone’s name, it was on a list of writers who had been awarded a prestigious National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. That was around 1990, I think. She was listed as a Lowell resident who had won…
Read More »Kate Hanson Foster: NEA Fellowship, New Book Completed, & More We caught up to a busy Kate Hanson Foster on the Groton frontier, where she lives with her husband, Bert, and their three children. She reports that the garden is pulled up and they just stacked a cord of wood…
Read More »David Moloney of Lowell: Forthcoming Novel, High Praise Bloomsbury Publishing will release David Moloney’s first novel, Barker House, in February 2020. He’s a Lowell resident and graduate of UMass Lowell and Southern New Hampshire University (master’s degree in creative writing). David’s novel has earned outstanding advance notices from well-known writers.…
Read More »Dave Robinson: Writer-in-Residence, Portugal Checking in with writer, poet, and multifarious arts guy Dave Robinson, we learned that he’s back from a Writer-in-Residence gig at Cultívamos Cultura in São Luis, Portugal. He was at the arts center in a dual role with his wife and creative partner, Anna Isaak-Ross, an…
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