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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-FM, re-wrapped as a “Guest Column” piece in the Sun newspaper, and showing up on this blog for the past…
Read More »With an election in the UK coming up soon, here’s a look back at the 2015 election by John Wooding, born in Northampton, England, and now a US citizen, who taught political science at UMass Lowell for many years. This is the election that led to the Brexit (British exit…
Read More »One of our occasional contributors, the poet-painter-farmer-social activist Chath pierSath is traveling in his homeland, Cambodia, and sending daily dispatches as poems and paintings on his Facebook page. A refugee from the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, Chath came to America as a boy and after various moves settled…
Read More »Yesterday’s Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day ceremony at the Lowell Memorial Auditorium featured the release of Community and Country: Greater Lowell Veterans Council, 1919-2019. Co-authored by former Veterans Council commander Bob Casper and me, the book tells the story in text and photos of the many organizations that are or have…
Read More »Frank Wagner is a former news director at KWHI in Brenham, Texas. Born in Corpus Christi, Frank earned degrees in English and Political Science from Southwest Texas/Texas State-San Marcos. He visited Lowell in 2007 to see the exhibition of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” scroll typescript and stays up-to-date with…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead. The author of The Underground Railroad has done it again, this time with a story of a prison-like reform school in Florida. Worse-than-Dickensian abuse occurred throughout this narrative, based on the real-life…
Read More »Writer Stephen O’Connor of Lowell recalls his neighbor in the Highlands and a fellow writer from the city. Since last fall, this blog has become a resource site for information about writers with links to Lowell, emphasizing people who are active now but also adding profiles of writers from the…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout. If you enjoyed Strout’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge , you will love reading Olive, Again, the sequel. Oh, to be able to write like Elizabeth Strout! Olive is sui generis……..except I find in…
Read More »Remembering the artist Carol Durand of Dracut, former director of the Whistler House Museum of Art and cultural activist in Lowell in the 1980s and ’90s, particularly. She passed away after a long illness. By way of San Antonio, Texas, and Mass. College of Art in Boston, her roots in…
Read More »Memories of Thanksgiving Days in our past are first about the food… the sense of smell is closely linked with memory, probably more so than any of our other senses… think of your family Thanksgiving gatherings… This morning Face Book popped up this photo ~ Thanksgiving Day, 2014… Billy and…
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