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Last night, students from the UMass Lowell Honors College First-Year Seminar in all things Lowell went on the road in Kerouac’s Lowell. I teach one section of the 22 sections of this required course in the Honors College. Nearly 400 students are learning about Lowell in a directed way this…
Read More »A poignant moment in the long struggle to uncover and record the grave markers and holdfast the history of the Irish in St. Patrick’s Cemetery as told by Lowell’s Irish historian Dave McKean… The twenty-year commitment may be coming to an end but read this cross-over post from LowellIrish for…
Read More »Earlier today on Facebook, Chath Piersath, a writer, poet, teacher, activist, and artist (and farmer in the region), posted a ringing statement about his optimism as a man in America. Chath has contributed to this blog in the past, so I asked him if I could reprint his thoughts here.…
Read More »About 15 years ago we departed Lowell for a week-long family hiking trip to Arcadia State Park in Maine and helped the long drive pass more quickly by listening to a book on tape. Our selection was perfect for the occasion: A Walk in the Woods, a 1998 best-seller by…
Read More »With all the walking and talking about walking going on in the city, I thought I’d share this poem from 1984, which originally appeared in my book STRONG PLACE: POEMS ’74-’84 and was reprinted in WHAT IS THE CITY? in 2006. In the ’80s, I had a Sunday routine of…
Read More »At the New Bedford Whaling Museum yesterday, Rosemary and I found in the gift shop a collectible mug whose design features about 20 memorable first lines of books, including Melville’s “Call me Ishmael.” from MOBY DICK, which is why they had it on sale, but the mug also had “I…
Read More »Here we go again. Labor Day is near, and the four-year presidential election cycle will shift into high gear. For months, we had media reports of candidates tromping through the hills and valleys of our neighbor state New Hampshire. I’ve written about this before, but I have to repeat that…
Read More »For anyone who needs a reminder about the distinctive region around us, just check the new issue of the New Yorker magazine with two major articles about historical happenings and people from our general area. Our local history keeps making news. Pulitzer Prize-winner Stacy Shiff writes about “The Witches of Salem:…
Read More »A couple of Saturdays ago the topic of the Lowell Walks tour was Lowell Artists, Past and Present. We visited several galleries and the Whistler House Museum of Art but the highlight of the tour for me, at least, was a visit to the City Council chambers at Lowell City…
Read More »Here’s a throwback thing to the pioneer days of festival-making in Renaissance Lowell. This was “Expo ’79, Art/Music” at Lowell Memorial Auditorium. Lowell CityFair was part of the federal jobs program (imagine that) called C.E.T.A. (Comprehensive Employment and Training Act) wherein a dozen or so Lowell artists were hired to…
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