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2021
Introduction The gaze of the literary world will focus on Lowell next year for the centennial of Jack Kerouac’s birth, which he in effect describes in his novel Doctor Sax (1959). Born on Lupine Road in the Centralville neighborhood on the north side of the Merrimack River on March 12, 1922, Kerouac lived here through high school, remained connected, and visited often, even returning to live for a short time in the 1960s. When he was a teenager imagining he might write books, Kerouac could pick up copies of the literary journal Alentour: A National Magazine of New Poetry, which was published in Lowell by poet Michael Largay and friends from 1935 to 1943. Just as Kerouac is not the only notable writer to emerge from Lowell, neither is Alentour the only literary magazine born in the city. Nearly a century before Kerouac’s birth, The Lowell Offering, “a repository of original articles written exclusively by females actively employed in the mills” had hundreds of subscribers across New England and the United States from 1840 to 1845. In recent times, the student Literary Society of the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, adopted the name The Offering for its annual literary magazine with work by campus contributors. In between, we had The New Lowell Offering for a short while in the 1970s, led by women faculty and librarians at the university. Lowell’s late-twentieth century renaissance proved fertile ground for literary journals. In the 1990s, UMass Lowell graduates Judith DickermanNelson and Rita Rouvalis launched The The Lowell Review
Lowell Review. Judith had edited The Lowell Pearl on campus. In 1989, writer and faculty member Karen Propp of thenULowell brought back The Lowell Offering for one issue linked to the school’s Summer Writing Program. With the advent of broad use of the internet, The Bridge Review: Merrimack Valley Culture (1997-2002) emerged from UMass Lowell Psychology Department— professors Charles Nikitopoulos and David Landrigan with then-graduate student Paul Marion. With a grant from the Building Communities Through Culture program of the New England Foundation for the Arts, they produced an online bioregional journal with writing, visual art, music, and videos. Jim Dyment’s Vyu Magazine premiered in October 1999 as a glossy quarterly publication that for the next decade promoted local music, photography, poetry, exhibits, and “anything to do with art.” Michael Casey, a graduate of Lowell High School and Lowell Technological Institute (now UMass Lowell) and an award-winning poet, issued The Acre pamphlet series in the early 2000s. Lowell’s embrace of the “creative economy” in the twenty-first century included the launch of Renovation Journal, edited by Kate Hanson Foster and Dennis Ludvino, which appeared each year from 2004 to 2008. Poet Meg Smith published Red Eft, an occasional journal of fantasy, horror, and speculative literature, and Stephan Anstey published Shakespeare’s Monkey Revue. The Middlesex Community College student 3
