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Government Shutdown Day 16 The partial shutdown of the federal government reached day 16 today. For most of the 800,000 federal employees who missed a paycheck last week, this political stunt will soon be a personal financial crisis. How many of them will miss rent payments, mortgage payments, car payments,…
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 »My annual review of Lowell political events for this past year: The nine victors in the bruising 2017 Lowell City Council race gathered at City Hall on Tuesday, January 2, 2018, take the oath of office and to elect a mayor. Bill Samaras won that contest with five votes to…
Read More »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…
Read More »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)…
Read More »“A Cataclysm for our District” Towards the end of Wednesday night’s review of the fiscal audit of the Lowell School Department, Connie Martin, the longest-serving current member of the Lowell School Committee said about the Lowell School Department’s fiscal mess, “This has been a cataclysm for our district.” Cataclysm is…
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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