The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Backyard barbecues, beach parties, fireworks, and concerts featuring the 1812 Overture – all traditional parts of the holiday celebrating the independence of our nation. What’s wrong with this picture? Why, the 1812 Overture, of course. This marquee finale…
Last Sunday, June 27, 2021, several hundred people from across the region gathered on Market Street at the Western Canal to witness the dedication of the Philip L. Shea Bridge. The cement and steel structure that was totally rebuilt in 2019 now bears the name of the only individual to…
Featured in today’s Irish Times is a collection of essays by prize-winning poet, Peter Sirr: “Intimate City: Dublin Essays.” This week, Trasna is pleased to present ‘A morning walk,’ one of the essays from this brilliant collection. Sirr’s essays explore Dublin’s past and present; travel its narrow lanes; meditate on…
Stumbling Upon The Town and the City By Mike McCormick One Sunday in late April, I wandered with my friend Matt as he pointed out his favorite businesses in an upscale shopping district on Bainbridge Island, a thirty-minute ferry ride west of Seattle. As we sauntered, I remembered days during…
The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Hill of Beans, the newest novel by Les Epstein, for 36 years head of the Boston University Creative Writing Program and author of 11 books, including King of the Jews, San Remo Drive, and Pandaemonium, is another of this writer’s novels…
The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Instructions for a Heatwave is another intriguing narrative about a dysfunctional family by Northern Irish novelist Maggie O’Farrell. Set in a 1976 heatwave in the U.K., the novel focuses on the family of Gretta Riordan, an Irish grandmother,…
The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Persist by Massachusetts Senator and failed Democratic Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren is the kind of memoir that breathes life into a policy tract. Warren’s campaign mantra was that for each of society’s problems, she had a plan. She still…
A Man You Don’t Meet Every Day By Stephen O’Connor “I never heard a singer as good as Liam, ever. He was the best ballad singer I ever heard in my life, and still is.” —Bob Dylan, 1986 Somewhere around 1982, not long after the noon hour on a Saturday,…
Derwin at the End of a Scribble By David Daniel He almost always came to class (maybe only because it was a place to be). He always sat in the back of the room, always with a fine-point Sharpie in hand in perpetual motion. Sometimes I would call on him:…
More than 34,000 Lowell residents voted in the November 4, 1942, state election. Besides selecting state officers and local representatives, the people of Lowell also chose by a margin of 16,477 to 14,135 to replace the existing Plan B form of government (a strong mayor and city councilors both elected…