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For the month of July, Trasna has been highlighting some of the literary and artistic events cancelled because of the COVID-19 pandemic. This week, in the spirit of the Lowell Folk Festival, we present The Wood of O, singer-songwriters Breege Phelan and Will McLellan. Based in South Tipperary, for the last two years, The…
Read More »For nearly 30 years, the approach of the last weekend of July has signaled the arrival of the Lowell Folk Festival. That won’t be the case in this pandemic-fractured year. But here are a couple of reminders of what we’ll be missing . . . 2007 WOW Opening at the…
Read More »Linda Hoffman has a fascinating new post on her Apples, Art, and Spirit blog. An accomplished artist as well as a farmer, Linda sculpts figures in wax. This post explains how a wax model is transformed into a bronze statue. Our journey of discovery involves a lavishly illustrated visit to…
Read More »Good books retain their newsworthiness, so I’m recycling this review-essay about Patti Smith’s most recent book, Year of the Monkey, which I posted on my website, paulmarion.com, late last year. This piece was written before the coronavirus spread among us, a time that seems six years and not six months…
Read More »John Wooding, professor emeritus of political science at UMass Lowell, is the author of the forthcoming biography Gandhi’s American Friend: Richard Bartlett Gregg (Loom Press, October 2020). He is a past contributor to this blog and president of the board at Mill City Grows in Lowell. ‘Cause I’m on the…
Read More »Today we’re introducing a new feature: Lowell Lists. Besides our ongoing presentation of new literary content by writers and poets from Lowell and beyond, we also hope to make this site the go-to place for information about Lowell. Since lists are a useful vehicle for presenting a large volume of…
Read More »Some Saturday morning cartoons from the past few weeks from our UK-based cartoonist, Nicholas Whitmore:
Read More »For the month of July here on Trasna, we have been highlighting some of the literary and artistic events cancelled because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The other significant arena of cancellations due to COVID-19 is, of course, sport. Today we present an article by Irish sports historian, Dr. Tom Hunt,…
Read More »One of the things that has distinguished Lowell from other similar sized cities in post Industrial America is its willingness to keep moving forward. Some efforts work well, others don’t. But the critical thing is to keep trying. Today, we dipped back in the archives and found four such stories,…
Read More »CROSS OF SNOW By Nicholas Basbanes 461 pp. Knopf. For many years my relationship with poetry might best be described as admiration from a distance so I would not normally pick up the biography of a poet. But the city of Lowell is a constant tug on my attention which…
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