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Boarding School Blues By Louise Peloquin Chapter 11: Cinephiles The atmosphere during lunch was as icy as the showers. On the menu that day was French-Canadian cottage pie called “Pâté chinois” (Chinese Pâté). Blanche had never understood what was “Chinese” about a layer of ground beef topped with kernel corn…
Read More »The recent death of Academy Award winning and Lowell-born actor Olympia Dukakis at age 89 got me thinking about Lowell’s contributions to American movies and television. There are many. Dukakis, the cousin of former Massachusetts governor Mike Dukakis, was born in Lowell in 1931. Her parents, Constantine and Alexandra (Christos)…
Read More »We are pleased to present here the opening scenes from a new historical novel by writer Tom Sigafoos. “The Cursing Stone” is set on Tory Island, off the coast of County Donegal in northwest Ireland. The year is 1884 and the islanders are threatened with mass evictions. What are they…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Today marks four months since the US Capitol was stormed by a mob intent on blocking Congress from accepting the Electoral College win for President Joe Biden. Inside the Capitol, a smaller mob of 147 Republicans, also seeking…
Read More »Dive Into Matt W. Miller’s New Book of Poems, Tender the River Prize-winning writer Matt W. Miller has a new book of poems in which he drills deeply into the bedrock of the Merrimack River and City-of-Lowell on its banks—as deep as any writer springing from the local watershed…
Read More »Ann Lord, a native of Manchester, NH, but a longtime resident of Alaska, recently reviewed Tom Sexton’s Cummiskey Alley: New and Selected Lowell Poems in the Anchorage Daily News. She recently shared the review with us. Here it is: Tom Sexton, a longtime University of Alaska Anchorage professor who retired in…
Read More »The Band that Never Got out of My Basement By David Daniel Like everyone, I was in a band once. Before guitars, drums, and keyboards replaced the accordion, bongos, and the ocarina as the staple instruments of rock-‘n’-roll. I was fourteen. The band was me (Manny LaPlante), my big brother…
Read More »Massachusetts By Tim Trask Most people know the Bee Gees as a phenomenon of the late 1970s: Disco, Saturday Night Fever, and all that, but I was introduced to them in January 1968 in Vung Tau, the Republic of Viet Nam. I’d been in-country for three days, the first…
Read More »Hearing Things Differently By Sheila Eppolito My parents met at a party near St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, in Brighton. My mother was a nurse there, and my father was invited by his brother, who was a resident. The story goes that amidst all the singing, boozing, smoking and dancing going on,…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barrons own blog. If you expected President Joe Biden to be a stuttering old man with a puzzled look on his face and wearing Depends, you may be disappointed. In his first 100 days and in his first speech to…
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