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North & South Ireland: Before Good Friday & The Celtic Tiger by James Higgins with an Introduction by Stephen O’Connor, 78 pages, $25 (Loom Press, 2020). A review by Mike McCormick James Higgins’ handsome new book of black-and-white photography captures the Emerald Isle that parents and grandparents of Irish-American baby…
Read More »Historian Paul Hudon is the author The Valley & Its Peoples: An Illustrated History of the Lower Merrimack and a collection of poems, All in Good Time. A former college professor and museum curator, he lives in Lowell. For nine weeks he has been sending his diary entries to the…
Read More »The Federal Writers’ Project was a New Deal program that provided jobs to unemployed writers during the Great Depression. The writers produced hundreds of publications including guides to states and cities and a variety of history projects. The best-known product of this effort was the American Guide Series which featured…
Read More »SUMMER’S GONE A short monologue By Jerry Bisantz This monologue is dedicated to my parent’s generation. The set is bare. Actor enters Center stage in blackout. He begins to sing. ACTOR “When I think of what we wasted it makes me sad… we never ‘preciated the things we had… now…
Read More »This month Trasna is featuring writers participating in Words Ireland National Mentoring Programme. Every year, 22 emerging writers are selected for the program in the areas of literary fiction, creative non-fiction, children’s/YA fiction, and poetry. Each are paired with mentors. Featured this week is poet Mark Roper, who acted as a mentor…
Read More »Here’s a post from eleven years ago as the country was trying to recover from the Great Recession. In the midst of the pandemic and its resulting economic distress, it seems a timely reminder that the old saying “in crisis there is opportunity” applies to city planning too. Is Lowell…
Read More »Michael Leary-Owhin, London-based photographer and author of Exploring the Production of Urban Space: international comparisons of three post-industrial cities (University of Chicago Press, 2016), a study of Lowell; Manchester, England; and a section of Vancouver, Canada, who we profiled last month on this site, has posted a new batch of…
Read More »This week Linda Hoffman writes about Lalla Unveiled: The Naked Voice of the Feminine, a book of poems by a 13th century poet from Kashmir named Lalla. In her review, Linda explains that Lalla left an abusive marriage and set out on her own, becoming a wandering mystic and prophet.…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. What’s the real reason Congressman Joe Kennedy is challenging Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey this year? It may well be that he fears if he waited for an open race for the Senate, after Markey or Senator Elizabeth Warren,…
Read More »Frank Wagner sends his poems to the Howe blog from his home in Texas. He’s a retired radio newsman. Going Home After Basketball By Frank Wagner Going home after basketball practice meant walking home in the dark. During those months, after the thrill of starting school in the steaming heat…
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