Candace Walsh

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...

I was 21, sitting on the grass of Tompkins Square Park in New York’s East Village. It’s the end of my first semester of college, and I recently quit going to the weekly Campus Crusade for Christ meetings when I realized that I felt more alive and honest hanging out with my new, queer and artsy friends at house parties

Holding forties in paper bags, my college friend and I chatted with her friend Chetta. She’d told me that Chetta was an out-and-proud gay woman a few years older than us, and I’...

When I decided to move to New York City, I was lured by its promise. I grew up in a part of Long Island where famous people never ventured or, to the best of my knowledge, originated. Exactly zero cinematographers thought it was a fine setting for a cosmopolitan film. Books, movies, and music were as mysteriously and remotely produced as cans of yellow cling peaches.
But only two hours away, there was no TV-screen membrane between regular people and household names. I walked into the corner b...