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A Catholic Schoolboy Discovers The Beatles (Haverhill, Mass., 1964) By Mike McCormick THE AIR CRACKLED as my fifth-grade classmates hung up their coats on the metal racks in the back of the room at St. James School. “Did you see Ringo’s rings?” “I love ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand!’” “Who’s…
Read More »It Needs Sweeping by Susan April On November 25, 1968, The Beatle’s double LP White Album was released. I was twelve, in eighth grade, and I had to have it. Wish I could say I had been swept into Beatlemania after watching their first Ed Sullivan Show appearance on February…
Read More »The Beatles Land in Little Canada by Charlie Gargiulo An excerpt from Legends of Little Canada: Aunt Rose, Harvey’s Bookland, and My Captain Jack (forthcoming from Loom Press, 2022) Not long after New Year’s Day, we started to hear about a musical group from England called The Beatles. It was…
Read More »Peuo Tuy is a spoken word poet, creative workshop instructor, and community organizer. Her poetry collection, Khmer Girl (2014), is inspired by the traumas of her life, including her family escaping the killing fields of Cambodia and enduring the inequities of life as immigrants in the U.S. Peuo is a founding member…
Read More »Learn About Kerouac on Zoom from Anchorage, Alaska Jack Kerouac, U.S. Navy, 1943 (colorized by metacolor on reddit) Alaskans and people around the country who are over the age of fifty will have an opportunity to learn about author Jack Kerouac in four seventy-five-minute Zoom sessions beginning February 10.…
Read More »Our friend and occasional contributor to this blog Tom Sexton in Alaska sent us a poem that he brought back from a recent walk near his home in Anchorage. Tom’s latest book is a collection of his best poems about Lowell, Cummiskey Alley, available at loompress.com, on amazon, and at…
Read More »A Wicked Good Book of Poems: Michael Casey’s Millrat A Review by Stephen O’Connor A professor of mine said James Joyce wrote, “of the common man, but not for the common man.” Who but a graduate student in English would ever attempt more than two pages of Finnegans Wake? And…
Read More »This essay was first heard as a radio essay on the “Sunrise” program of WUML, 92.5 FM, at UMass Lowell. Executive producer Chris Dunlap assembled writers in the area for the daily essay, a popular component of the morning public affairs show with a daily essay by writers from the…
Read More »This article first appeared in Merrimack Valley Magazine (Nov/Dec, 2020). “Oh, Babe, What Would You Say?”: A Holiday Mosaic Painting by Vassilios Giavis, reprinted from Merrimack Valley Magazine. St. Patrick’s Day, 1986, Liberty Hall (Merrimack Rep Theatre) in Lowell Memorial Auditorium. Benefit reading for a new organization pledged to…
Read More »Joe Blair grew up in Westford, Mass., and now lives in Iowa. He is the author of By the Iowa Sea: A Memoir, a story about a family in a small town which Oprah’s magazine “O” described this way: “so raw and true you’ll gasp.” On his Facebook page, Joe…
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