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Our far-flung correspondent Down East in Maine sent us a new poem. Tom Sexton of Lowell and Alaska and Maine reports that he gave a poetry reading to a capacity audience at his Atlantic Coast-base in Eastport, the youngest attendee checking in at about 60 years old. I say, You…
Read More »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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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…
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…
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