Ann Fox Chandonnet In recent years, I have been able to connect with the creative world of my Lowell State / Class of 1964 classmate writer/ poet Ann Fox Chandonnet, through her editor at Loom Press – my longtime friend and colleague Paul Marion. Connections were hit and miss and…
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Eliot Church at South Common (Wikimedia photo) Survey Team With its spire ringed in scaffolding, the Eliot Church on the rim of the South Common in Lowell, Mass., looks like a church in Dresden, Germany, shown yesterday on the TV news, the spire there circled with staging from which workers…
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Olympia restaurant by Michael Casey here with a high school friend Panos and the restaurant is in the Greek neighborhood in Lowell and in a far corner are two elderly ladies Panos excuses himself and goes to say hello to these homegirls and the ladies eventually recognize him as…
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Poet Maggie Dietz of UMass Lowell In her weekly Substack newsletter, ‘New England Literary News,’ writer Nina MacLaughlin shares her view of a new collection of poems by Maggie Dietz of the UMass Lowell Dept. of English. Readers can subscribe to New England Literary News here. Here is the brief…
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Born in Lowell, poet Matt W. Miller has published several award-winning collections of poetry. He lives with his family in southern New Hampshire. The prestigious journal Tupelo Quarterly features new work by Matt in the current issue. Here’s the link to the page (note the small arrows to advance to…
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This prose poem appears in my book What Is the City? (2006), which is out of print but sometimes available in used condition on internet sites. Jackie Brady was a champion boxer in Lowell, Mass., in the 1960s. The local scene from the 1980s described here predates the easing of…
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New poem with Lowell setting in the latest issue of The Café Review in Portland, Maine, which has been around for a long time. I have three poems in this issue, and have been in the magazine previously. Kudos to them for keeping the magazine alive. The CR has interviews,…
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This article, slightly revised, appeared first in Merrimack Valley Magazine in December 2021 when Covid had become part of daily life. Invited to write a piece about holiday time in the area, I dialed back to my childhood and later college years when downtown Lowell was a magnet for people…
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Our longtime contributor Chath pierSath, writer and painter, is featured in the current issue of the prestigious “New England Review” with collaborator Seán Carlson. In the category of “Testimonies,” the duo has “Painting the Last Photograph: Art and Memory After Genocide.” Chath and Seán are organizing a…
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Poet Tom Sexton (photo by Kevin Harkins) Thanks to Michael Burwell of Alaska for sending us two recent commentaries on the late Tom Sexton and his final book of poems, “Dark Cloud in Isabel Pass” (Loom Press, 2025). Michael’s review-essay appears in “Cirque” literary magazine of Alaska and Nancy Lord’s…
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