Partnership
conference to receive UNESCO’S global city of the year award.
The coming together of Lowell and Cork in this literary anthology may surprise some people, but in retrospect the two cities seem obvious collaborators.
Both have rivers running through them, the Lee in Cork and the Merrimack in Lowell. Cork has more people, at about 200,000. Each is known for being an industrial city, Lowell more in the past and Cork very vital now. Their similarity is strong in the areas of culture and education. Both places are recognized as hubs of art and heritage with lively creative economies among scores of historic structures.
Cork’s annual Lifelong Learning Festival is akin to the Lowell Folk Festival in scale and as centerpiece events in their respective cities. When Wooding heard about Cork’s Learning City project, he recognized something familiar and, of course, the potential.
Lowell, too, had relaunched itself as an urban center by using education as a theme for redevelopment. Patrick Mogan’s “educative city” concept of the early 1970s set the foundation for what would be Lowell’s National Historical Park, which employs the city as a museum for lifelong experiential learning for people of all ages. The late Mogan was a key early figure in convincing the federal government to chronicle the city’s diverse ethnic and industrial heritage as an urban national park.
Both cities offer education from pre-k to university doctoral programs, and the educational institutions are integrated into city life.
The partnership between Cork and
Lowell is open-ended, building on the mutual interest in the global Learning Cities network of the United Nations.
At the city level, the effort was sponsored by City Councilor William Samaras, the former mayor and a former Lowell High School headmaster.
“Making Lowell a UNESCO learning city to me is something that would help us to be known internationally, we are anyway, but show that we value education,” Samaras said.
The anthology project, a celebration of Cork and Lowell writers and literature, has begun a dialogue among writers and editors in both places.
Paul Marion, the anthology’s co-editor and publisher, hopes that dialogue will likely yield further collaboration, including the exchange of writers for residences there and here.
After a year of work, “Atlantic Currents” was published by Marion’s company, Loom Press earlier this year.
Among some of the essays is one by Lowell historian and North Middlesex County Register of Deeds Richard Howe on the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013; selections by former Sun Reporters Patrick Cook, Jennifer Myers and David Perry; and Tewksbury’s Marie Sweeney, who wrote about being recognized in 2015 as an Anam Cara honoree, which recognized those who have made significant contributions to the preservation of Irish culture and heritage in the Lowell area.
A top city official, Solicitor Christine O’connor, is also featured with a piece called “Road Trips: Where Strange Things Pass.”
Marion, a Lowell historian and former Umass Lowell community relations specialist, said of O’connor: “She’s quite the writer and has been in Ireland several times for workshops, conferences, and just visiting. She knows a many Irish writers.”
Atlantic Currents was reviewed by author Jacqueline Maloney on Howe’s wellread blog, Richardhowe.com.
Maloney wrote: “The stories in Atlantic Currents reveal the basic humanity across many worlds, age ranges, and economic strata. There are stories of the aftermath of the Vietnam War and of the Khmer Rouge genocide, of a man coming to terms with a murder he’s committed, of the suicide of a wealthy and successful young beauty, stories that grab your attention in the first sentence and have you still absorbed after the final one.
And there are poems with the same intensity: poems that make you smile in recognition; a poem honoring the Indian past of Lowell; a poem that explores the meaningless cycle of birth, mundane existence and death; a poem that honors a housepainter father; a poem on gentrification; a poem about a mother explaining to a six-year old how he got inside her belly. And so much more.”
Printed by Lowell company King Printing, the 330-page book was ready for launch in March. Then the pandemic hit.
After putting the book launch on hold, the team behind it organized a virtual launch. On Oct. 2 the editors and writers joined Wooding for a virtual broadcast to celebrate the anthology.
Wooding, Marion and Samaras hope to build upon the virtual launch and host more events in the spirit of a learning city. Marion is considering organizing a broadcast series with groups of the anthology’s writers and hopes to one day organize a writers exchange between Lowell and Cork.
Wooding and Samaras too hope to establish more regular events beyond the annual learning festival.
“To afford everybody in the city of Lowell an opportunity, no matter what age, to learn something, that’s my dream,” Samaras said.
Recalling the Oct. 2 virtual launch, Marion said it was a special moment for everyone on the project to finally meet.
“I think that’s going to contribute to whatever comes next when we’re finally in a position to go back to some normal practices socially when the virus gets under control,” Marion said. “I think we’re going to build on the relationships just starting to emerge.”