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Thy Sister’s Keeper By Stephen O’Connor It was back in ’92. While I attended UMASS, Lowell, working toward a degree in English, I had a job working for the Massachusetts Guardian Security Services. Armed with my radio and Maglight Tactical Flashlight, I would prowl the darkened alleys and hollow hearts…
Read More »Three for Halloween By David Daniel 1: Speed Dating at the Lonely Monsters Club When they get off the elevator, the sign is on an easel outside the function room: SPEED DATING EVENT TONIGHT Nervously, Shanna runs her hands down her hips. “This is going to be another big fail,”…
Read More »Daniel Wade, award-winning playwright, poet, essayist, and novelist, is making his second appearance in Trasna this week. Following his memorable tribute to poet Dermot Healy, last year, Dublin-born Wade has been actively pursuing his writing career and is now celebrating the release of his historical novel, A Land Without Wolves.…
Read More »Here’s a press release about statewide recognition of two great Lowell-based organizations, Angkor Dance Troupe and Free Soil Arts Collective. Angkor Dance Troupe and Free Soil Arts Collective Selected for Statewide Initiative Supporting Community-Rooted Arts Free Soil Arts Collective (www.freesoilarts.org) and Angkor Dance Troupe (www.angkordance.org) were selected to participate in…
Read More »Lunch.Break.Haiku. By Doug Sparks After leaving my job for a publishing company last month, I began picking up odd hours working as a substitute teacher in the public schools. You may have heard, there’s a shortage. While this job doesn’t give me a lot of spare time, I get a…
Read More »Rooted in Brooklyn By Malcolm Sharps Prompted by Betty Smith’s iconic novel of childhood, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Malcolm Sharps reflects on his own childhood and family life and attempts a comparison Betty Smith, author of the semi-autobiographical A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, wrote in an introduction to a…
Read More »The original grant for the town of Lowell only included about 20 percent of the land that makes up the city today. Over the rest of the nineteenth century, the Massachusetts State Legislature annexed portions of Tewksbury, Dracut, and Chelmsford to Lowell to give the city its current configuration. Here…
Read More »Autumn is the season that embraces reflection: thoughtful persons give thanks for their harvest even as they mourn the [human] losses that befell them during the time past. In the poems she reads for Trasna, works from her newly published collection Reshaping the Light, Irish writer Breda Joyce voices the…
Read More »Remembering the 1980 Winter Olympics By Dean Contover We woke up at 7:30 a.m., warmed up the van and left Waitsfield, Vermont, heading for the Olympic Games at Lake Placid, New York. It was the last day of the XIII Olympic Games. The final games were going to be played…
Read More »Wormwood By Stephen O’Connor Just before noon, the cloud bank that had hunched over the city like a great gray cat skulked off to the west, giving way to light. Lowell always looked beautiful to me in the sun: red brick and gray stone under blue. Along the cobbled streets…
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