Candace Walsh

By Candace Walsh •
Raven Leilani’s Luster is a craft and theme kaleidoscope, every turned page yielding a new configuration of angles and juxtapositions. What happens in this novel—twenty-three year old Edie, a Black woman artist manquée working slackly in low-level publishing, meets art conservator Eric, a middle-aged married white man from Milwaukee, who is in a newly open marriage; this leads to an enduring collision between Edie, Eric’s staggeringly competent coroner wife (also white) Reb...

The son I carried for (I know who she is but can’t say: hint hint, she’s winkingly Sapphic enough to quicken our pulses) is five, quarantining with Mum and her husband (harrumph) on their English estate, the article said she humbly admits to success with homemade crumpets and wryly bemoans daily squabbles over home learning; a child often sulks and balks when his mother picks up schoolmarmish chalk…they’d never need to know he once swelled my belly and plucked my sciatic nerv...

Published by Entropy Magazine.

Before we were told to avoid air travel, but after the lines at Costco were thirty people deep, the house finches chose our ledge.

Through the window I saw one brindled dun and gray, cream-rimed at her wing’s scallops and striped breast, her mate the same but red-capped and cloaked. Tightly-locused hopping on their splinter-fine feet. Heads domed and darting. My hands washed the dishes with acorn-scented soap. My winter ears drank in their susurrating chirps.

We’d lived in the house less than...

We’re delighted to share in the celebration of Santa Fe Noir, out today from Akashic Books, with this excerpt from our regular CRAFT contributor Candace Walsh!

Imagine a memoir in the form of a centipede. Each segment of its body is a chapter. In each chapter, the narrative takes on a new genre’s characteristics, from noir to Choose Your Own Adventure. This is Carmen Maria Machado’s second book, In the Dream House: A Memoir. Her narrative flows through each discrete-genre segment like the centipede’s life force: potent, skittery, undulant, spiky, and fluid.
Once, Carmen Maria Machado fell in love with an unnamed woman writer, who gained her trust, m...

Ludlow Street will always be stuck in 1994, the year I moved from Buffalo to live in an Alphabet City summer sublet. I may also always be stuck in 1994, in complicated thrall to the Perland sisters.

When I made a reservation to stay at a glossy, high-rise hotel on Ludlow last year, I did so with the urge to collide my present-day self against my younger self. I wanted to slip into the old Ludlow’s grotty sepia, walk past paint-tagged storefront gates closed like brittle eyelids over vacant sh...

Someone recently told me, “The best way to learn a language is when you love somebody who speaks that language.” I remembered that as I gingerly slid into the neighborhood pool last summer. Immersion.
I have been in lots of kinds of water over the last twenty years. The Italian Riviera with my wife, windmilling my legs to stay clear of the craggy piles of barnacled boulders, feet offshore from giving-no-fucks Italian grandmas sunning their dimply swags of flesh in skimpy bathing suits. A ceru...

We’re thrilled to publish another two-part series by Candace Walsh! You can find her two-part essay on Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt in the archives. Here, Walsh explores intertextuality in two contemporary short stories. Part I considers Jess Walter’s “Famous Actor,” and Part II delves into Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Husband Stitch.” —CRAFT
By Candace Walsh •
In Jess Walter’s “Famous Actor” and Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Husband Stitch,” the authors use intertextuality as a struct...

We’re thrilled to publish another two-part series by Candace Walsh! You can find her two-part essay on Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt in the archives. Beginning here with Jess Walter’s “Famous Actor,” Walsh explores intertextuality in two contemporary short stories. Look for Part II on Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Husband Stitch” in October. —CRAFT
By Candace Walsh •
In Jess Walter’s “Famous Actor” and Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Husband Stitch,” the authors use intertextuality as a st...

--“I’m said to be a very gifted analysand,” you humble-bragged in your interview, quite elegantly. I used to be so efficient with my therapist’s time, but the older I get, the more agile I become at skirting the stuff that makes me ugly-cry...--

Dear Francine du Plessix Gray:

I am writing to inform you that The New Yorker search field’s autocorrect changed Plessix to Pelisse before my very eyes. Dictionary.com definitions for pelisse describe “an outer garment l...

With some help from Patricia Highsmith's 1952 novel The Price of Salt, Candace Walsh explores the power of the paragraph.
Fiction writers agonize about using le mot juste, and we also strive for finely honed sentences. But what of the paragraph? A power paragraph can serve as a story’s fuse box, sending softly glowing, undulating, or hissing-hot power to different parts and levels of a story. This power paragraph can also serve as a hinge in the middle of a novel, as it does in Patricia Highs...

A personal essay about bears, motherhood, the writing life, and Goldilocks.

"An ocean gyre is a spiral of currents—formed by the combined forces of global wind patterns and the earth’s rotation—that can swivel up to 330 feet below the water, just like a theme is a dynamically layered mass beneath the front story, or surface, of a novel": Candace Walsh takes an ocean-deep dive into Ruth Ozeki's 2013 novel A Tale for the Time Being...

At the beginning of my second semester at Warren Wilson College’s MFA for Writers, my supervisor Ana Menéndez challenged me to identify th...

This is Part II of a two-part series by Candace Walsh about Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt, and how Highsmith confronts the male gaze with a different way of seeing, and by employing the other senses. Part I explores the queer gaze. Part II concerns the other senses, particularly hearing and smelling. —CRAFT
By Candace Walsh •
As thousands of tweets and several articles attest, women have grown weary of the way many male writers describe female characters: zooming in on their body par...

This is Part I of a two-part series by Candace Walsh about Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt, and how Highsmith confronts the male gaze with a different way of seeing, and by employing the other senses. Part I explores the queer gaze. Part II, coming in February, concerns the other senses, particularly hearing and smelling. —CRAFT
By Candace Walsh •
I almost didn’t read Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt, one of the most influential, relevant, and exquisite novels I’ve ever encounter...