Candace Walsh

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...

At these memorable Albuquerque B&Bs;, step back in time, or over the border.
“Albuquerque has bed-and-breakfasts?”I heard that more than once while researching this article. Apparently, the charms of these properties are better known to those outside New Mexico than to in-staters. That’s a shame, as bed-and-breakfasts offer one of the most transporting lodging experiences around—a way to feel ensconced in a home away from home without any of the attendant chores and frets. They’re ideal for A...

Art escapes its frames at Nativo Lodge.
Hotel guests are used to art in hotel rooms—that is, in a frame, likely chosen for its generic and blandly soothing properties. In four rooms of Albuquerque’s Nativo Lodge, however, art has taken over the walls from floor to ceiling—in the bedrooms, hallways, even the bathrooms. Frames hardly have a presence at all.
Nativo Lodge is one of Heritage Hotels’ boutique properties, which include Las Cruces’s Encanto and Santa Fe’s Hotel Chimayó. The group’s h...

Getty
Dear Twentysomething-year-old Me,
1. When that man you have a crush on asks, “Are you a good girl or a bad girl?” laugh in his face, spin on your heel and ignore his calls.
2. Wear sunscreen. At least around your eyes and above your currently pert upper lip’s cupid’s bow.
3. Just because you share blood with people doesn’t mean you have to give them the time of day if they are hell-bent on making you feel small, misunderstood and wrong. You’ve given them enough chances. Cut the cord.
4....

Click here to read an original op-ed from the TED speaker who inspired this post and watch the TEDTalk below.
My father brought home treasures left behind on the Long Island Rail Road: a folded, read New York Post, umbrellas, even a pair of binoculars unclaimed at the lost and found. He brought home the smells of mingled passengers and their commute: cologne, cigarettes, the fug of hot underground tunnel exhaust, hot dogs with mustard and onions, hot coffee trucks.
But what he pulled out of h...