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Although I was born in Lowell (est. 1826), in the Centralville section, I grew up in Dracut (est. 1701) from the age of two through my college years. My neighborhood’s colonial-era name was New Boston Village, but that wasn’t used when I was there. We didn’t have a name for…
Read More »Sarah Sousa: A Fruitful Creative Path I met Sarah Sousa a few years ago at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival in Salem, Mass. She was there with friends from Perugia Press, an independent publishing company in Florence, Mass. Perugia publishes one title a year, a first or second book by a…
Read More »I waited a long time before writing about 9/11, not because I didn’t want to but because I could not find the right words. I had composed a short, oblique poem called “The Cut” that delved into the way Nature tends to heal itself when it can, the way tree…
Read More »I read a Memorial Day Facebook post about Michael J. Monahan of Dracut, a Keith Academy graduate and Boston College student who enlisted in the Marines and was killed at Quang Tri in South Vietnam in 1966. He was a radio operator, nineteen years old. There’s a playground on Pleasant…
Read More »In the Merrimack Valley ~ Rumors and Rumblings… Maybe people need a distraction from the weather, whatever the cause – rumors and rumblings are reverberating around the Merrimack Valley. Soft rumblings in the Town of TEWKSBURY… will Scott Wilson run for reelection for the Board of Selectmen? papers were pulled…
Read More »I’ve posted this prose poem from 1978 on the blog before. It was written soon after the experience that provided the brief story thread. In those days, I was constantly on the lookout for images and incidents that could feed a new composition. I wanted to write, write, write. It’s a slight piece, but…
Read More »“1249 Hildreth Street” by Richard Marion (c) 2014 [original c. 1960] A view of the back yard of the Marion home at 1249 Hildreth Street in Dracut around 1960. The painting was made by Richard Marion when he was a student at Massachusetts College of Art. See more artwork at…
Read More »“One fine morning, not long ago, I strolled down the Merrimac, on the Tewksbury shore. I know of no walk in the vicinity of Lowell so inviting as that along the margin of the river for nearly a mile from the village of Belvidere. The path winds, green and flower-skirted,…
Read More »Illustrations from the Blizzard of ’78, when I was living at Whitecliff Manor apartment complex off Mammoth Road in Dracut. I made these colored sketches in my big writing notebook, sitting at a desk in front of a window in my bedroom that overlooked the parking lot.—PM
Read More »Overnight, I heard the BBC report that Peter Seeger had died, a man whose life became absorbed in the music of our nation both as a singer of traditional songs and a composer of new works. I was lucky enough to hear him sing when I was a high school…
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