January 12 , 2023 Stephen O'Connor author of " Northwest of Boston."

 Stephen P. O’Connor is a native of Lowell, Massachusetts, home of Beat author Jack Kerouac, where much of his writing is set. He is the author of "Smokestack Lightning," a collection of short stories, and the novels "The Spy in the City of Books" and "The Witch at Rivermouth." O’Connor has worked as a roofer, a garbage collector, a harvester of grapes, a drywall man, a shoe salesman, a factory hand, and for more than twenty years, a high school teacher. He earned master’s degrees from University College Dublin and UMass Boston, and has lived and worked in Ireland and in France. O’Connor lives with his wife Olga and their two children in Lowell. When he’s not working or writing he can be found walking in the woods, drinking coffee downtown, playing soccer with the old boys or cranking out Irish tunes on a fiddle inherited from his Uncle Eddie.

Michael Keith and Greg Wolos discuss their new books.... Dec 14, 2022

 Michael Keith will discuss his collection of flash fiction "Quiet Geography." Greg Wolos will discuss his collection of short stories " Green Ray and other Stories."

Tom Laughlin: "The Rest of the Way"

 

TOM LAUGHLIN is a professor at Middlesex Community College in Massachusetts where he teaches creative writing, literature, and composition courses, as well as coordinating the MCC Visiting Writers Series and open readings for students, faculty, and community members for the Creative Writing Program. He also coordinated the Writing Across the Curriculum Program at Middlesex Community College for many years; coordinated an Early Academic Intervention Program, the Writing Center, and creative writing activities at Massasoit Community College for nearly a decade; and taught literature classes in two Massachusetts prisons.

His poetry chapbook, The Rest of the Way, was released by Finishing Line Press in August 2022.

Guests September 7 Victor Wallis and Inez Hedges

 Victor Wallis and Inez Hedges will talk about their new books--- Socialist Practice by Wallis and Staging History from the Shoah to Palestine by Hedges.

Aug 24, 2022 Poet Mike Ansara author of "What Remains"

 

Michael Ansara, Poet

Founder of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, Michael Ansara’s first book of poems, “What Remains”, was published by Kelsay Books in 2022. Michael spent many years as an activist and an organizer starting with the civil rights movement of the 1960’s, going on to be a regional organizer for SDS. He spent 10 years organizing opposition to the war in Vietnam. For 15 years, Michael worked as a community organizer including directing Mass Fair Share. He has worked on political campaigns, coordinated voter registration efforts, and trained many organizers. He owned and ran two successful businesses. He currently serves on the Executive Committee of the Redress Movement and the organizing team for Together We Elect. His poems have appeared in numerous journals and his essays have appeared in Vox, Arrowsmith, Solstice and Cognoscenti. He is currently working on a memoir. He lives in Carlisle, MA, with his wife Barbara Arnold and dotes on his three children and six grandchildren.

Lawrence Millman July 6 5PM Live!

 

Lawrence Millman is a man of many talents. As an author, he has written 16 books, including such titles as Last Places, A Kayak Full of Ghosts, An Evening Among Headhunters, Lost in the Arctic, and — most recently:

Goodbye, Ice: Arctic Poems (2020)

The Book of Origins (2019)

At the End of the World: A True Story of Murder in the Arctic (2016)

Giant Polypores and Stoned Reindeer (2013)

Hiking to Siberia (2012)

Fascinating Fungi of New England (2011)

As a mycologist, he has studied fungi all over the world, but especially in his own backyard of New England. And as an explorer, he has made over 40 trips and expeditions to the Arctic and Subarctic. The photo shows him in a contemplative mood on a beach in Siberia.

May 8, 2022 Poet Kevin Gallagher discusses his new collection The Wild Goose

 

The Wild Goose by Kevin Gallagher

Book Description

The Wild Goose was a hand-made magazine of verse written and edited by John Boyle O’Reilly aboard the Hougoumont, the last ship to transport British convicts to Australia. O’Reilly (1844-1890) was an Irish Fenian sentenced to life imprisonment for infiltrating the British army and attempted mutiny. O’Reilly escaped from Australia aboard a whaling ship and settled in Boston where he rose to become an editor of The Pilot, a noted poet, and abolitionist.

In a sense, these poems are a little magazine conceived of and drafted in 2018 and 2019 when Gallagher was a poet-in-residence at the Heinrich Boll Cottage, on Achill Island, County Mayo, Ireland. In addition to a sequence on O’Reilly, the poems in this book engage the Irish landscape, and the history and myth that formed the identity of some of the Gallagher’s ancestors until British colonialism and associated famine took them to Massachusetts.

Commentary

Kevin Gallagher’s new book begins with Irish myth and ends with his own myth, as he visits his father in a classically tinged underworld. Using a variety of poetic forms, Gallagher creates a blend of Irish-American family experience and Irish history that features both his father and a colorful nineteenth-century Irishman who ended up in America. This poetic blend of the poet’s imaginings, memories, and careful research is absorbing, entertaining, and enlightening. —Martha Collins, author of Because What Else Could I Do?

Kevin Gallagher shows us how his sense of an Irish identity is more than a hand-me-down, that it depends on an unflinching examination of the ways voices from the past—not all of them benevolent—shape who we are and how we see the world. Gallagher imagines an array of such voices, from figures in pre-Christian myths to historical figures who resisted British colonialism. The arc of the collection aims, however, toward the present, to the Irish-American experience as well as what the poet sees and hears in Ireland today. The culmination of The Wild Goose comes in a dream-vision in which the poet is granted access to the afterlife and meets his deceased father. Says that father to his grieving son: “Let me hear you talk. I’ll talk to you too.” Crystalline imagery and carefully crafted lyrics embody Gallagher’s difficult and demanding dialogue with the long and often painful story of the culture he comes from. —Fred Marchant, author of Said Not Said.

To over-underscore how Kevin Gallagher delves into Celtic mythology from the get-go with the wonderful love-poem “Birth of a Nation” and plumbs the raw contemporary ring of those legendary, gender-bendering heroes and heroines—Eithlinn and Cian, Deirdre and Diarmuid, Lir, Cairbre, Bres, all that—might be to miss the larger project, all-in, this collection’s vast and variegated canvas stretched beyond history and in your face. In The Wild Goose you will find and lose, often in the same breath, your compass points, become a bit, as the French say, déboussolé. All in a good way. Unmoored, not plot-lost. Gallagher’s poems read exquisitely and easily. With a preference for nifty, drop-stitch, loose-iambic couplets, villanelles that hypnose, The Wild Goose runs riot in lyric narrative gear, its best poems top-shelf distillations of story and meditation. And you won’t find many affirmations of a redemptive immigration policy that welcomes refugees finer than the sonnet sequence “The Journal of John Boyle O’Reilly.” —Aidan Rooney, author of Go There