Atlantic Currents: Connecting Cork and Lowell brings together sixty-five writers from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean whose stories, poems, essays, songs, and parts of novels come to us in familiar voices. While we recognise the sound and sense in these works because of the well-travelled routes between Ireland and America, there is much to discover in todays writing from both places. Complex relationships, sublime joy in small and large matters, destabilising external forces, the hunger for harmony, snares of history, transcendent moments in special locations, the simple attempt to get through it all every day -- all this and more the reader will find. Spurred by a desire to make a strong bond between two historic cities whose modern resurgence has been driven in large part by commitments to lifelong, experiential, community-based learning and teaching. The organizers of Cork Learning City and Lowell: City of Learning found each other two years ago and set about collaborating in the spirit of UNESCOs Learning Cities global network. With this anthology, the connecting thread is made stronger through the now entwined writing and reading in both places.
Paul Marion (b. 1954) is the author of Union River: Poems and Sketches (2017) and editor of Jack Kerouacs early writing, Atop an Underwood (1999). His book Mill Power (2014) documents the twentieth-century revival of the iconic factory city where he was born, Lowell, Massachusetts. With Tina Neylon and John Wooding, he edited Atlantic Currents: Connecting Cork and Lowell (2020), featuring writers from Ireland and America. His recent work has appeared in So It Goes, the journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum & Library in Indiana; Café Review in Portland, Maine; PoetsReadingtheNews.org, a national online publication; SpoKe Seven, a Boston-based poetry annual; Résonance, a Franco-American journal at UMaine Orono; and Merrimack Valley Magazine. With his wife, Rosemary Noon, he lives on a high hill in Amesbury, Mass., in sight of the seacoast and uplands of New Hampshire and Maine.
