Past Gloucester Poet Laureate John Ronan reads the poem “The Coming Centennial” during the annual Gloucester Inauguration ceremony in 2024.
Interviews with a veritable Who’s Who of local writers, poets, historians and other creative personalities will be preserved for generations with the gift of a local cable television show’s archives to the Cape Ann Museum.
Gloucester’s John Ronan, producer and host of “The Writer’s Block with John Ronan,” which began in 1990, will be part of the celebration 2-4 p.m. Saturday, May 2, at Cape Ann Museum Green, 13 Poplar St. in Gloucester. Ronan will be joined by a panel of five past guests reflecting on the show’s legacy and its lasting connection to the Cape Ann literary community. The featured guests are Deborah Cramer, John Christie, JoeAnn Hart, Heidi Wakeman and Ken Riaf.
The writers featured on the show are diverse, ranging from the late local historian Joe Garland to the avant-garde with the late poet Vincent Ferrini. The list of nearly 500 guests includes artistslike Theresa Bernstein, musicians like Gloucester’s celebrated jazz trumpeter Herb Pomeroy, writers of fiction and non-fiction, as well as long-time newspaper editors. The list is as endless as topics to write about and encompass all genres.
“Widely recognized as one of the longest-running and most successful public access programs in the country, the series has played a vital role in documenting and celebrating the region’s literary voices,” according to a program statement.
Looking back over the decades, Ronan said he is indebted to his guests who shared their stories, showcasing the “huge, creative flow of Cape Ann writers — and other brands of artist.”
“No guests, no series,” he said. “And now that the series is archived at Cape Ann Museum, all of those talented folks can be seen and appreciated and inspirational all over again.”
In 2025, Ronan gifted the program’s archives to the museum, which ensures the preservation and public accessibility of the series. In turn, the gift supports the museum’s commitment to sharing stories of contemporary Cape Ann, according to a museum spokesperson.
Cassie Anderson, the museum’s librarian and archivist, said Ronan’s donation of “The Writer’s Block” film archives is important to the documentation of the diverse literary community of Cape Ann.
“John has created an incredible research tool for anyone interested in the history of writing on Cape Ann. We are excited to share these materials with the public on our online catalog, Quartex,” Anderson said.
A poet, writer, filmmaker, teacher, and journalist, Ronan has been a central figure in Cape Ann’s literary life for decades, according to a program statement.
He is professor emeritus at North Shore Community College and served as the City of Gloucester’s poet laureate from 2008 to 2010. His work has been recognized with honors, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He continues to write and publish poetry, most recently with the release of his latest collection, “The Idea of Light.”
Ronan is dedicated to fostering a love of poetry in the community and nurturing emerging voices, and in that spirit, he founded a poetry scholarship at Gloucester High School and established the city’s annual Poetry without Paper contest. Winners of the contest also have been featured guests on the program.
His website, Theronan.org, has a list of guests, links and more details.
/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/logo.png00Haley Wolfe/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/logo.pngHaley Wolfe2026-04-30 16:46:072026-04-30 16:46:11Gloucester Daily Times: John Ronan to be feted for 36 years of ‘The Writer’s Block’
Even if you’ve never so much as doodled, you’ll see why these sites have stirred creative hearts for generations.
With its storied fishing fleet and striking downtown skyline, Gloucester Harbor has appeared in thousands of paintings and photographs, most famously during the peak years of American Impressionism from the late 1880s through the 1910s. Noted examples, several of which are exhibited in the Cape Ann Museum, include Frank Duveneck’s Horizon at Gloucester (1905), which captures the harbor panorama from Eastern Point, and Fitz Henry Lane’s Gloucester from Rocky Neck (1844).
Perhaps no artist is more closely associated with the area than Lane, who resided in an imposing Gothic Revival stone house on Rocky Neck, a craggy peninsula of Gloucester that juts into the harbor and supports one of the nation’s longest-running art colonies. Luminaries such as Milton Avery, Mark Rothko, and Nell Blaine also practiced their craft there, and today artists are still enchanted by the same scenes.
Out of the waters west of Rocky Neck rises Ten Pound Island, the subject of several works by Winslow Homer, who painted some of his dramatic breeches-buoy rescue scenes while living on the island. Across Gloucester, on the eastern shore, Childe Hassam painted Top of Cape Ann (1918), showing two nude women sunbathing at Bass Rocks, which is also the site seen in Edward Hopper’s celebrated watercolor Gloucester Beach, Bass Rocks (1924).
On the north shore of Gloucester, idyllic Annisquam captivated a multitude of painters including Postimpressionist Maurice Prendergast, who created several watercolors between 1915 and 1925 depicting locals in colorful swimsuits cavorting against a backdrop of bathhouses and cottages.
In central Cape Ann, wooded trails snake through the eerie, long-abandoned colonial settlement of Dogtown. It was captured on canvas by John Sloan (Dogtown, Ruined Blue Fences, 1916) and in several works by Marsden Hartley that focus on the area’s massive granite boulders, which led the artist to describe the scenery as “a cross between Easter Island and Stonehenge.”
Now flooded with water, the former granite quarry at Rockport’s Halibut Point State Park caught the eye of Abstract Expressionist Jan Matulka, who presents it in an almost Cubist style in Rockport Quarry (1929). Leon Kroll celebrates sunlight reflecting off its jagged, rocky shoreline in Babson Farm Quarry, Halibut Point (1913). Not far to the south is Bradley Wharf and the iconic red fishing shack rendered in artworks so many times it earned the moniker Motif Number 1.
Salem’s waterfront has witnessed mariners setting off on or pulling in from nautical voyages for three centuries. Viewed from Winter Island Park, scenes of schooners and sloops have been immortalized in brushstrokes by scores of artists, including Fitz Henry Lane in his fanciful 1853 oil painting Salem Harbor.
On Plum Island, just off the coast of Newbury, Parker River National Wildlife Refuge preserves a pristine expanse of windswept dunes and migratory-bird habitats. The seeds of numerous late-19th-century landscape paintings by American Impressionist and Amesbury native Charles Harold Davis were planted here.
This blog is an excerpt from our digital guide “250 Ways to Explore, Discover, and Celebrate North of Boston”. To view the full guide, click here.
/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/logo.png00Haley Wolfe/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/logo.pngHaley Wolfe2026-04-15 15:31:492026-04-15 15:32:07North of Boston: Encounter Landscapes That Have Inspired American Artists
Clark Fine Art Services installing the 13-foot plaster version of Walker Hancock’s Pennsylvania Railroad Memorial inside the atrium at the Cape Ann Museum on Wednesday.
A 13-foot plaster model of a Walker Hancock statue has risen again in the newly renovated lower atrium of the Cape Ann Museum’s downtown campus, as the 150-year-old cultural institution begins to put artworks back into place as it prepares to reopen June 30.
The fragile plaster of Paris prototype for Hancock’s Pennsylvania Railroad War Memorial, also referred to as the Angel of the Resurrection, was gently lifted back into place between two towers of scaffolding as it was reinstalled by several workers under the guidance of sculptor and conservator Robert Shure.
Born in St. Louis, Hancock (1901-1998), one of the celebrated World War II Monuments Men, would later make Gloucester his home.
The actual 39-foot bronze sculpture, commissioned by the Pennsylvania Railroad as a World War II memorial, is located on the main concourse at Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station, one of the country’s busiest railway stations.
Considered one of Hancock’s most important works, the memorial depicts the Archangel Michael lifting a lifeless soldier in his arms, with the base bearing the names of more than 1,300 railroad employees who died in the war.
During the reinstallation Wednesday, first the main body of the angel was raised, followed by re-attaching the angel’s wings and sealing the seams during the delicate operation.
This is the start of the work taking place as the galleries will begin to be filled with displays, artwork, archival materials and much more after the $9 million, 20-month renovation of the museum’s Pleasant Street campus.
Shure had overseen the deinstallation of the Hancock sculpture in October 2024 prior to the construction work.
Hancock, a longtime friend and advisor to Cape Ann Museum, had a notable career, which also included the Stone Mountain Memorial in Georgia.
“His subjects have included presidents George Bush, Abraham Lincoln and James Madison; vice-presidents Hubert Humphrey and Gerald Ford; poet Robert Frost; and General Douglas MacArthur. His works grace the Library of Congress, West Point, the Great Americans Hall of Fame and the National Cathedral,” according to a Cape Ann Museum bio.
Sculptor Robert Shure, right, looks on at installation.
Besides repopulating the galleries with its collections, museum staff are preparing the ground-breaking special exhibition, “Avery, Gottlieb & Rothko: By the Sea.” The exhibition also opens June 30, and is the first time in Cape Ann Museum’s 151-year history that one of its exhibitions will travel to Washington, D.C., to the The Phillips Collection, which partnered with Gloucester’s museum to showcase the exhibition more widely to new audiences.
To read the full Gloucester Daily Times article, click here.
/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/logo.png00Haley Wolfe/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/logo.pngHaley Wolfe2026-04-10 10:27:132026-04-10 10:27:20Gloucester Daily Times: Cape Ann Museum reinstalls model of a Walker Hancock war memorial
The 2024 deinstallation of the plaster version of late sculptor Walker Hancock’s Pennsylvania Railroad War Memorial in preparation for its re-installation at the Cape Ann Museum.
GLOUCESTER, Mass. (WBZ NewsRadio) — After a $23-million-dollar fundraising campaign and a makeover, the Cape Ann Museum in Gloucester is getting set for its grand reopening on June 30.
The museum has been closed for almost two years while undergoing renovations.
One of its feature exhibits is the re-installment of the 13-foot plaster version of sculptor Walker Hancock‘s Pennsylvania Railroad War Memorial, one of his most celebrated works.
It will be raised and secured on the museum’s atrium wall.
Hancock (1901–1998) lived in Gloucester’s Lanesville area and was a longtime advisor to the Cape Ann Museum.
Several of his most important works are in the museum’s permanent collection.
His famous subjects include: Presidents George H.W. Bush, Abraham Lincoln, and James Madison; Vice Presidents Hubert Humphrey and Gerald Ford; poet Robert Frost; and General Douglas MacArthur.
Created between 1949 and 1952, the memorial depicts an angel lifting a fallen soldier; its base bears the names of more than 1,300 railroad employees who died in World War II.
The Cape Ann Museum is located at 27 Pleasant St. in Gloucester.
/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/logo.png00Haley Wolfe/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/logo.pngHaley Wolfe2026-04-08 15:22:292026-04-08 15:22:38WBZ News Radio: Gloucester’s Cape Ann Museum Re-Opening Soon
When AI threatens your job, listen to what a classic children’s book has to say about reinventing yourself.
By Scott F. Latham and Beth K. Humberd | April 2, 2026
Matt Harrison Clough
As organizations like Amazon, PwC, and Microsoft have announced AI-fueled layoffs, it’s no surprise that half of Americans have expressed concern about AI’s larger potential impact on their jobs. Of course, companies can attribute layoffs to AI efficiencies while trimming workforces for various reasons. Yet there is no question that artificial intelligence is causing disruption in the job market, making both entry-level jobs and roles in functions like HR and project management, for example, harder to find. Workers and leaders are currently faced with an overwhelming amount of advice for navigating this period of uncertainty. As we move through a historic period of AI-driven labor disruption, why not turn to a place of comfort and simplicity in the pages of a well-known children’s book?
Our ongoing research, focused on the future of work, recently took us to the Virginia Lee Burton archives at the Cape Ann Museum in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Burton is well known for her children’s stories, including The Little House, Life Story, Katy and the Big Snow, and Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel. Through archival research, we learned that the story of Mike Mulligan offers powerful historic lessons on labor disruption and job adaptation that may provide comfort and guidance for workers and leaders in today’s AI age.
The Story of Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel
One of Burton’s most enduring stories is Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, published in 1939, about steam shovel operator Mike and his steam shovel, named Mary Anne. (Befitting a children’s book, Mary Anne is an anthropomorphized earth-moving machine.) The story is set against a future of work that unfolded a hundred years ago. After the Great Depression, the U.S. economy experienced wide-scale mechanization, standardization, and mass production designed to lift the economic situation. As a team, Mike and Mary Anne play a significant role in the boom; they lay the foundations for buildings, open waterways for ships, level the ground for highways, cut tunnels for railroads, and smooth the earth for airfields.
However, their success is somewhat short-lived, as technological advancement brings superior machinery into play. At its core, Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel is a story of disruption, change, and adaptation. Mike and Mary Anne lose their jobs when new innovations arrive; steam shovels like Mary Anne and steam shovel operators like Mike Mulligan are no longer needed.
Burton writes, “Then along came the new gasoline shovels, and the new electric shovels, and the new diesel motor shovels, and took all the jobs away from the steam shovels.” As the image below conveys, Mike ends up sitting dejectedly on a log while Mary Anne cries oil tears — both of them out of a job at the hands of disruptive innovation. “No steam shovels wanted” is boldly painted on the fence in the background.
Cape Ann Museum Library and Archives
While at first things seem hopeless, the book shifts to a story of adaptation and ends with a successful occupational pivot. After digging a hole for the construction of a new town hall (their last job as a steam shovel and operator), Mary Anne becomes the steam furnace in the basement of the building. Mike becomes the building’s custodian, responsible for caring for the new furnace.
But arriving at that point was complex: Mike had to take a series of risks professionally, trust in his ability to adapt, and persevere in the face of disruption to reinvent himself in an occupational sense.
Three Modern Lessons From Mike and Mary Anne’s Successful Pivots
While doing our larger body of research on the future of work, we saw how this classic children’s story captures the critical underpinnings of a successful occupational pivot in the face of a dramatic, exogenous shift. It offers three key lessons for today’s workers facing a similar technological-driven disruption from AI tools.
1. Embrace technology to realize a new occupational identity.
The book foreshadows a dynamic that is central in today’s economy: The future of work will involve a high degree of human and technological collaboration. Not too long ago, the prospect of AI in our day-to-day work lives felt more like science fiction than reality; and yet, in the very near future, the vast majority of jobs will require employees to work with artificial intelligence to some degree. In some roles, AI has already changed the nature of the job altogether. Yet workers across many professions continue to resist and combat the inevitable rise of AI tools.
We hear a lot about human-AI collaboration and even cobots, but are workers today truly embracing the interdependence?
The first essential lesson to be drawn from Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel is the need to reconsider our working relationship with technology: Rather than seeing it as a disruption, we can embrace technology as a means of discovering new opportunities, and perhaps even a new professional identity.
When faced with the prospect of being a custodian, Mike could have politely declined the opportunity: “No, thank you. I am a steam shovel operator.” Doing so would have echoed a degree of ignorance with respect to the larger disruption occurring (steam shovels being replaced by superior technologies). Instead, as the story illustrates, when faced with an occupational pivot, Mulligan said, “Why not?”
Workers today can learn a lot from this. It can be anxiety-provoking to consider an occupational pivot, especially when your identity is tied to your work (“I am a steam shovel operator. It’s who I am!”). But Mike Mulligan leans into the disruption.
In the context of AI, we hear a lot about human-AI collaboration and even cobots, but are workers today truly embracing the interdependence? Rather than seeing AI simply as a technological tool, they can consider how the technology might provide a renewed sense of purpose in their careers, just as it did for Mike Mulligan.
As the technology evolved, Mike evolved in his career and his sense of self. Today’s accountants might be toiling away on Excel spreadsheets that soon will migrate to AI platforms (if they haven’t already). They could already be working with AI agents or soon will. They can push back (“I’m an accountant, not a programmer!”), or they can learn from Mike Mulligan and say, “Why not?”
2. Understand shifts in how value is delivered.
Back in 2018, we wrote an article on the four ways in which jobs will respond to automation. The central premise of our framework was a focus on value: We argued that every jobholder uses a set of core skills to deliver value in some form to a recipient, and thus the key to understanding job evolution is to consider adapting value provision based on emerging technologies. Ironically, Mike and Mary Anne seemed to understand this same premise better than some workers do today.
How did Mike and Mary Anne shift from steam shovel team to furnace team? In Burton’s world, the transition was predicated on the use of their respective skills to provide value in a new context. The last image in the book shows Mary Anne as a furnace connected to the heating ducts, applying her “skills” to deliver new value: providing heat.
Mike is shown sitting in a rocking chair next to Mary Anne, ensuring that her operation supports the building for many winters to come. The team once provided value through digging holes; they shifted to providing value by delivering heat to the town hall and maintaining the building.
Cape Ann Museum Library and Archives
The lesson? While they were sad when their earlier jobs were taken over by superior engines, they were creative in finding a way to use their skills to provide value in a new context.
Several years ago, we worked on a project through a U.S. Department of Labor grant, using our job evolution framework to assist workers who were impacted by the closing of a nuclear power plant. These educated professionals, including nuclear engineers, scientists, and project managers, had expected to work their entire careers at the plant but now had to pivot to use their skills in new contexts. (The nuclear power plant job market was not booming at the time.) One of the biggest challenges we witnessed was that individuals tended to box themselves in relative to their job as prescribed; they struggled to think about how their skills could deliver value in a new context.
Our framework, which focuses on separately assessing skill threats and forms of value delivery, helped those workers reframe the application of their skills outside of the nuclear industry. This effort landed some of the workers in IT, data science, or even environmental consulting roles. But doing so wasn’t an easy fix: It required personal reflection, analysis, and a willingness to make creative moves. Ultimately, by focusing on value creation, those professionals landed in places they never thought they’d be, much like Mike and Mary Anne.
3. Leaders must not lose sight of organizational purpose.
Our last lesson is for leaders: Don’t fall prey to the siren call of AI at all costs. AI is an enabling technology meant to help organizations create new efficiencies and sources of value. A leader’s role is to consider the company’s higher identity and purpose — and then to help employees, customers, and key stakeholders understand how AI can serve and even strengthen that sense of purpose.
Though not specifically referenced in the book, the historical backdrop of Burton’s story is that Mike and Mary Anne were part of the Works Progress Administration — a Roosevelt-era federal jobs program that was instrumental in getting people back to work during the Depression. Yet many historians have noted that in addition to job creation, the WPA’s primary purpose was to instill hope in a down-and-out country.
Don’t fall prey to the siren call of AI at all costs.
In the book, Mike and Mary Ann’s greater purpose and value was also providing hope — to the town, through the new town hall where they worked as a team. It’s a lesson that organizational leaders need to consider. What organizational purpose is AI strengthening? Also, what aspects of organizational identity do your company’s AI plans reflect to workers and other stakeholders?
For example, Lyft’s leaders have described the company’s AI integration work as grounded in its long-standing purpose “to serve and connect.” Rather than shaping the company’s AI narrative around the tools, leaders are keeping the company’s purpose front and center.
Think about the underlying reason your organization exists. AI strategies should ultimately reflect who your company is (organizational identity) and its reason for being (organizational purpose).
Resilience in the Face of Disruption
Collectively, these three lessons fall under a broader theme from Mike and Mary Anne’s story: resilience. On the back of Mary Anne, a sign proudly proclaims “Mike Mulligan — Dig Anything, Any Time, Any Place.” The message captures confidence in the pair’s abilities, and a willingness to work; indeed, their work ethic and perseverance are the basis of their pivot. When they are displaced by innovation, they scour the country for new jobs and believe enough in themselves to take on the challenge of building a town hall in Popperville — as a team. (Burton explicitly states that Mike couldn’t abandon Mary Anne.) They embrace resilience in the face of disruption.
Cape Ann Museum Library and Archives
While the current period of AI disruption feels new to many of us, the experience of labor disruption is truly timeless. In the Cape Ann Museum’s archives, we found a letter from a fan to Burton dated Dec. 5, 1942. The reader, Mrs. Helen Baurd, shares that her father was a steam shovel operator who, along with his colleagues, held the Mike Mulligan story near and dear to his heart and, in fact, passed the book around: “‘Mike Mulligan’ traveled all over. … The men loved it,” she writes. Imagine a first edition of Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, covered in grease and shared among operators on lunch breaks, providing inspiration for those men to continue working. The fan’s letter concludes powerfully, “I thot you would be interested to know you are not only giving pleasure to children but to many grown-ups as well.”
Whether it be pleasure or inspiration you take from Mike and Mary Anne’s story, it captures the real-world challenges of individuals dealing firsthand with job disruption. The letter’s closing sentiment is the basis for this article. While Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel is a children’s story, we believe that it offers a powerful parallel for individuals who want to write their own ending in this age of AI. One hundred years ago, the hero was a steam shovel operator; today, it might be a programmer or nuclear engineer. Whatever our role may be, we can all learn about career pivots and resilience from Mike Mulligan and Mary Anne.
/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/logo.png00Haley Wolfe/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/logo.pngHaley Wolfe2026-04-02 12:46:492026-04-02 12:46:54MIT Sloan Management Review: Job Pivots in the Age of AI: Lessons From Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel
