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 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

literary magazine is The Dead River Review, based in the English Department, while Lowell High School has its own literary magazine.

In 2011, the Cultural Organization of Lowell, the city’s cultural affairs office (led by LZ Nunn at the time), published Young Angel Midnight: An Emerging Generation in the Arts in Lowell, edited by Derek Fenner and Ryan Gallagher, with writing, visual art, reports on art spaces, and an accompanying mixtape produced by musician D-Tension. The state cultural council staff said no other community in Massachusetts had ever done anything like this for its young creatives.

There were other short-lived ‘zines, tabloids, graphic broadsides and sheets of creative writing as well as online sites. Independent book publishers Bootstrap Press, the Lowell Historical Society, and Loom Press provide books of interest to local and national readers. Increasingly, writers use digital publishing and marketing to release and sell their books.

Poet William Carlos Williams believed that the small literary magazine plays an outsized role in American culture:

“The little magazine is something I have always fostered; for without it, I myself would have been early silenced. To me it is one magazine, not several. It is a continuous magazine, the only one I know with an absolute freedom of editorial policy and a succession of proprietorships that follows a democratic rule. There is absolutely no dominating policy permitting anyone to dictate anything. When it is in any way successful it is because it fills a need in someone’s mind to keep going. When it dies, someone else takes it up in some other part of the country—quite by accident— out of a desire to get the writing down on paper.”

The success of Lowell’s creative economy strategy has been most evident in the visual arts. Western Avenue Studios in the old Massachusetts Mohair Plush Company mill along the Pawtucket Canal may be the largest concentration of visual artists east of the Mississippi River. The eclectic shops of Mill No. 5 on Jackson Street draw crowds that validate the retail strategies urged by New Urbanists. Downtown has an enviable lineup including the Whistler House Museum of Art, the New England Quilt Museum, Brush Art Gallery & Studios, Gallery Z, Gates Block Studios, the Arts League of Lowell, and the Ayer Lofts Gallery.

Music and the performing arts are offered at the arena-sized Tsongas Center at UMass Lowell, Lowell Memorial Auditorium, Merrimack Repertory Theatre (MRT), and in intimate settings like the Olympia restaurant’s Zorba Room, Luna Theater, the Old Court pub, and Warp & Weft restaurant. The Lowell Folk Festival and Lowell Summer Music Series bring first-rate musical acts to outdoor venues. MRT leaders are right to remind us that literature is the basis of theater. Somebody wrote the play. And somebody else wrote the words for a song.

But there is no full-service bookstore. There’s no writers’ center with workshops, readings, talks, films.

The National Park Service has gift shops with books at the Visitor Center downtown and the Boott Cotton Mills Museum. UMass Lowell and Middlesex Community College have campus stores, which emphasize course books. Mill No. 5 has a shop for rare and used books,

Serpentine.

The Pollard Memorial Library presents author talks and sponsors book clubs; the Moses Greeley Parker Lecture Series features authors in its annual lineup; writers and singers enliven the annual Lowell Celebrates Kerouac! festival; UMass Lowell and Middlesex Community College create and share literature; Brew’d Awakening Coffeehaus welcomes spokenword artists; and other organizations chip in.

But compared to the robust visual arts and music scenes, literary life in Lowell seems lacking in opportunities to promote and encounter local and visiting writers and poets. There’s nothing on the scale of the Brush Art Gallery & Studios or Western Ave. Studios for writers, a locale with every day visibility.

This gap is unfortunate because Lowell has fiction and nonfiction writers, poets, playwrights, historians, and scholars in the arts, humanities, and sciences who publish. In late 2018 and early 2019, Paul Marion wrote and posted on RichardHowe.com profiles of some two dozen active Lowellconnected writers and poets: Susan April, Jay Atkinson, Michael Casey, David Daniel, Anthony Febo, Emily Ferrara, Kate Hanson Foster, Matt Kraunelis, Jacquelyn Malone, Matt W. Miller, Helena Minton, David Moloney, Jack Neary, Stephen O’Connor, Resi Polixa, Emilie-Noelle Provost, David Robinson, Kassie Dickinson Rubico, Tom Sexton, Brian Simoneau, Meg Smith, and Sarah Sousa.

And there are more. Novels, memoirs, historical works, and poetry keep coming from David McKean, Bob Hodge, Chath pierSath, Princess Moon, Michael Boudreau, Masada Jones, A. G. Reidy, Jacqueline Cayer Nelson McDonald, Matt Fitzpatrick, and T. R. Monaghan (Theresa Batalogianis). For almost twenty years, author Andre Dubus III has anchored the creative writing courses at UMass Lowell while doing his own recent work: Townie, Dirty Love, and Gone So Long.

Gaining steam in the Lowell writing lane is the Cambodian American Literary Arts Association, which promotes emerging and established writers of the Cambodian diaspora. They envision a network of writers active in publishing and storytelling with an intercultural, intergenerational approach. The Free Soil Arts Collective seeks to cultivate in the region a more diverse arts community and believes the narratives of marginalized peoples must be explored to ensure everyone is fairly valued. They quote the late John Lewis: “The movement without storytelling is like a bird without wings.” They are creating more opportunities for people of color

Paul’s amalgamation of literary talent made a deep impression on me and coincided with my own reassessment of the mission of the blog that bears my name. Launched in 2007 to cover Lowell history and politics, RichardHowe.com became mandatory reading for anyone interested in city politics. That mission reached peak intensity in 2017 with the bitter fight over the location of a new Lowell High School. People have always been passionate about politics in Lowell, but the 2017 fight left deeper scars and was more destructive to the community than any conflict I have witnessed in my fifty years of following city affairs.

Why was that so? I believe that social media was the main reason. In that, our community reflected national and global trends. Facebook primarily, but also Twitter and others, reward extremism and coarseness and diminish reasoned conversation. While we are the ones making incendiary and hurtful utterances,

the technology encourages it and makes it far too easy. Social media also creates a vortex that sucks in most other forms of media. Viewers and listeners are drawn to outrage like junkies in need of the next high. With media companies in the business of staying in business—higher ratings mean more money—there is no incentive to throttle down the rhetoric.

In my introduction to History as It Happens: Citizen Bloggers in Lowell, Mass. (2017), I wrote:

Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University who writes and lectures frequently on the social and economic effects of the internet, maintains that throughout history new technology has tended to become available long before society figures out how to best use it. Shirky says that is exactly the case with the internet, which was a disruptive technology that drastically changed the media landscape. He also says that these disruptive phases of history are periods of intense experimentation. I see RichardHowe.com as an openended experiment in community communications.

With the internet having become even more disruptive since writing that, I concluded it was time to pivot away from day-to-day local politics on RichardHowe. com and take a longer, more in-depth view of the world around us. What better way to do that than to highlight the writing of the many talented individuals in our midst and others with connecting threads to the region and still others “from away” who have found the blog and contribute.

“Voices from Lowell & Beyond” replaced “Lowell Politics & History” as the subtitle of the blog. Stories, essays, and poems by David Daniel, Louise Peloquin, Jerry Bisantz, Susan April, Stephen O’Connor, Joe Blair of Iowa, Chath pierSath, Tooch Van, George Chigas; Marie Louise St. Onge, Juliet Haines Mofford, and Nancye Tuttle of Maine; Frank Wagner of Texas, Malcolm Sharps of Hungary, Jack McDonough; Tom Sexton and Michael McCormick of Alaska, cartoons by Nicholas Whitmore in England, and writers from Ireland published each Friday on our Trasna feature (edited by Christine O’Connor, Jeannie Judge, and Margaret O’Brien) have replaced weekly Lowell City Council meeting reports and bulletins on local political events.

Will this new direction of RichardHowe. com make a difference in the community conversation? I hope it will, but the whole point of an experiment is to test a hypothesis, and our experiment continues.

In the meantime, RichardHowe.com has presented a stream of words. Every day brings a fresh story, essay, or poem— and yet content on the internet is fleeting even if archived. Today’s gem is pushed down the page by the next post. Because of the success of History as It Happens, our earlier “best of the blog” book, co-editor Paul Marion and I imagined a followup. The blog’s evolution to its current content suggested that a print publication modeled on traditional literary journals is the appropriate format. When Judith Dickerman-Nelson, a co-founder of the earlier Lowell Review, gave her consent for us to bring back that title, this new publication was born.

Richard P. Howe, Jr. Lowell, Massachusetts July 2021

SECTION I

HE V I R US T