Let's write about Lowell Celebrates Kerouac!

So, who is tending the Kerouac flame in Lowell?

Opinion echo published in the Sentinel& Enterprise newspaper in Lowell, Massachusetts by Rev. Steve Edington in Nashua NH.

A quick introduction: I am a near 30-year member of the Lowell Celebrates Kerouac Committee and have twice served as the organization’s president.

Our current President is Judith Bessette. LCK (Lowell Celebrates Kerouac) was originally formed in 1986, to create the Kerouac Commemorative at Bridge and French streets. 

Moreover, the committee has continued on, producing an annual Jack Kerouac Festival in October, a Kerouac birthday observance in March, and other various Kerouac related events.

Since the time of LCK’s founding, Kerouac has become an internationally recognized literary and cultural figure. As the year 2000, approached, Modern Library ranked his signature novel, “On the Road,” 55 in the top 100 American novels published in the 20th century. Time Magazine rated it as one of the 100 best English language novels published between 1923 and 2005. Kerouac’s literary legacy has become an integral part of the curricula for American literature courses taught at American colleges and universities around the country.

Reflecting on all this, I view my involvement with Lowell Celebrates Kerouac with a mixture of pride and frustration.

I am proud to join with my fellow LCK committee members in keeping the Kerouac flame alive in his hometown. I am pleased at the ways we honor and celebrate his Lowell roots, as shown in the five Lowell-based novels he wrote that portray the city in the 1920s and 30s. I am pleased to host the Kerouac tour requests we get year-round, by way of our website, from persons who want to see his birthplace, gravesite, as well as many other places in Lowell that Jack describes. I especially remember meeting a busload of students from Aberdeen, Scotland, a few summers ago who wanted a Kerouac tour included in their American East Coast visit.

I’m grateful for the friendships my LCK involvement has given me with persons all around the country and world who have been touched by the writings of Kerouac. It is a joy to witness, every October, those who make the trip to Lowell to nurture and replenish their Kerouac Spirit.

Here is where my pride mixes with frustration: The lion’s share of keeping the Kerouac flame and spirit alive in Lowell falls to an all-volunteer group with no paid staff, and no physical base of operation, and who do all we do on a nickel-and-dime budget that we manage to cobble together from one year to the next to keep LCK going. Such has been the case now for the past 30 years even as Kerouac has become a global figure.

Yes, the University of Massachusetts at Lowell has the Jack and Stella Kerouac Center for the Public Humanities. I commend the very good work my friends, Professors Michael Millner and Todd Tietchen, do in giving Kerouac his much-deserved standing in academia. But what about Kerouac’s standing in the city of his birth that first shaped his literary consciousness?

I appreciate the fine contributions the Whistler House and its staff make to Lowell’s artistic and cultural life.

I’m also aware that these contributions are done in the name of world-renowned artist who quite vehemently renounced his ties to Lowell. What about a world-renowned writer who devoted five of his numerous novels to his Lowell origins, and honored its Franco-American culture?

But, in the end, it’s really not about my pride or my frustration. It is about the city of Lowell, along with its many historical, cultural, educational, and artistic communities and organizations, coming to a fuller awareness of just what they — what we — have here with respect to the ever-growing legacy of Kerouac. We at LCK have, in recent years, received some modest support for our efforts from the city for which we are grateful. Let’s treat this as a start towards an even greater civic engagement in Lowell when it comes to celebrating Kerouac.

A little over a year from now the Jack Kerouac Centennial will get underway. Jack was born on March 12, 1922,

 in Centralville. I am pleased to be the convener of a broad-based coalition in Lowell that is coming together to make plans for a series of Kerouac Centennial events to take place during 2022. This coalition consists of representatives of the kinds of groups and organizations cited above.

In addition to giving Jack Kerouac the recognition he deserves in his hometown in the 100th year of his birth, my hope is that those of us who are coming together now can show the way forward — in the years beyond 2022 — for keeping the Kerouac flame in Lowell burning even brighter.

Rev. Steve Edington is the Minister Emeritus of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashua, N.H. He is the author of The Beat Face of God: The Beat Generation Writers as Spirit Guides and Kerouac’s Nashua Connection.