At the blog, we’ve had a great response to the series of updates on writers linked to Lowell and the region. My co-blogger Paul Marion contacted the writers and did the overviews of their activity in the past year as well as hints about what’s forthcoming in 2019. I wanted…
Sarah Sousa: A Fruitful Creative Path I met Sarah Sousa a few years ago at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival in Salem, Mass. She was there with friends from Perugia Press, an independent publishing company in Florence, Mass. Perugia publishes one title a year, a first or second book by a…
Susan April: The Writing Adds Up I’m interested in what writers do to make a living while they do their best to create high quality poems, fiction, plays, and works of nonfiction. Very few literary writers are employed full-time at the keyboard. Journalists, technical writers in business, advertising copywriters, and…
Live Poetry in Lowell by Janet Egan and Paul Marion Lowell has been long-famous for Golden Gloves boxing matches at the Memorial Auditorium, but there’s a different competition for which the city has become well known. Every first and third Tuesday of the month, writers and their audience get together…
Kassie Dickinson Rubico and Resi Polixa: On Their Writing Trails Our series of year-end updates on writers from the area continues with a past contributor to the blog and a writer who is new to our publication. We’ve had an enthusiastic response to the series both in this space and…
Matt Kraunelis & the Grey Court Poets of Methuen Matt Kraunelis believes in the power of poetry to make a community more vibrant. I’ve known Matt since his days as a founding member of the Robert Frost Foundation in Lawrence, which has brought poets like Seamus Heaney and Robert Pinsky…
Jay Atkinson: Writer in Motion When I asked Jay Atkinson what he’s been up to this year, he gave me a rich summary that included a song-bite: “Take what you need and leave the rest . . .” Jay lives in Methuen, Mass., and Lowell has been one of his…
Meg Smith: Writer in Full Stride Meg Smith is in full stride as a writer. She says 2018 has been “a full and blessed” year. She published her book This Scarlet Dancing (Emu Press) and placed poems and short fiction in several literary magazines and journals, including Café Review, The Literary Hatchet, Strange…
Picking up the thread for our series of updates on writers linked to Lowell and the region. David Daniel: New Books, Flash Fiction I can’t say I discovered David Daniel in the Samuel de Champlain sense, but I found out about him through his novels, particularly The Heaven Stone (1994)…
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…