Let’s face it most of us are more concerned with the TREATS than we are with the tricks of Halloween. The candies we consume, recall from our childhoods, and share at Halloween speak to our generosity, taste, budget, and feelings of nostalgia. My personal tradition is, of course, candy-centric. Each year, I hang a basket of candies on my doorknob starting a few days before Halloween. I always note the responses from my immediate neighbors. There are no children living on my floor right now, so most of the people passing my door and grabbing a candy bar (or two
Read More
It’s Almost Halloween!
It’s no surprise—I love Halloween. I have fond memories of homemade costumes, bags stuffed with candies, crazy parties in college (and a few years after), plus strange struggles to come up with costumes that were fun and still comfortable on the dance floor, as Tango Halloweens have been my norm in recent years. Halloween entertainment—books, movies, TV shows and plays—have always been a part of my celebrations, and are becoming more important. I look forward to watching awful, old Frankenstein, Dracula & werewolf movies on TV; to the Simpson’s annual animated gore & giggle fest; to the endless Halloween-themed baking
Read More
English as a Second Language
English is a crazy language! I often remind myself that I’m fortunate to have grown up with what has become the international language of commerce, art, and everything else. English has become the default over French (the original lingua Franca) in situations from diplomacy to Internet shopping. It’s everyone’s second language—if it’s not the first. I’m acutely aware of the advantage of having English as a first language. This is especially poignant, as my foreign language skills are dreadful! If I can’t become competent in Spanish, German, Italian or Dutch, let me, at least, become helpful to others learning English.
Read More
Picture Prompts
Every picture tells a story, right? Some tell more than one. Others whisper. A few shout. I took all the following photos during a short visit to the Metropolitan Museum in New York City. The museum recently rehung, rearranged, and added some works of art from their vast storage facilities. In with my old familiar friends (paintings I’ve known and loved all my life) there were unfamiliar works and paintings by artists never covered in my art history classes. I was happy to discover 18th, 19th and early 20th century artists from Scandinavia, as well as “new” artists from Belgium,
Read More
Books that Changed Us
I know that reading Agatha Christie’s ‘Death Comes as the End’ early in my life helped point me in a mysterious direction, but there were other books that had a lasting impact on my life as a reader, writer and, yes, as a person. My father read bedtime stories for years after the fairy tale stage. Some of these were classics that he read aloud more than once—‘A Wrinkle in Time,’ ‘The Phantom Tollbooth’ and, most of all, ‘The Secret Garden’ come to mind as books that stirred my imagination and taught me the power of storytelling. But when I
Read More
The Sound of a Story
I went to a play on Saturday night. It was not the usual Broadway show. Even Off-Broadway, ‘The Encounter’ would be considered an unusual approach to theater. It’s all about SOUND! Based on the novel ‘Amazon Beaming’ by Petru Popescu, which in turn was inspired by the experience of Loren McIntyre, a National Geographic photographer, when he got lost in the remote Javari Valley in Brazil in 1969. Written, co-directed and performed by Simon McBurney (of Complicite) it’s a one-man show and NOT a one-man show, because his co-star is SOUND. I’ve been to staged readings of old radio plays.
Read More
Poetry & Me
Way in the back of the closet underneath my loft, there’s a red file cabinet filled with OLD writings. If I ever feel inclined to do an archeological expedition, I would find poems I wrote from the age of twelve through college. Sometime after college I abandoned poetry in favor of prose. I’m not sure why or how this came about, but it did. Perhaps it was the hopelessness I felt in the poetry writing class I took in college—hopelessness born from having to read and encourage the work of fellow college poets—or maybe it was simply a need to
Read More
Call Me Candy
I’ve written Monster Meditations on the significance I give to naming characters in fiction, but lately I’ve been confronted by my own name. Let me back up a bit. My given name is Candida. Pronounced with a subtle accent on the first syllable and the ‘I’ in did sounding like ‘did’—as in “that’s what they did” and not deed. When I was growing up it drove me crazy when people pronounced it in the Spanish fashion with a long E sound (Candeeda) and a bit of an accent on that syllable. Now that I have many Latin American friends and
Read More
Recycling Ideas
I try to recycle. I bring my paper, bottles & cans down to the recycling bins in the basement of my building. I attend clothing swaps—shedding what I’m not wearing and getting the rejects from other women’s closets. (Swaps are a great clothing recycling idea.) I even bring my lemon peels, apple cores & egg shells to the composting stall at the Union Square Farmers Market. But the recycling that is dearest to my writer’s heart is the recycling of story ideas. I’m not referring to “borrowing” a gambit or a mysterious red herring from other writers, or simply riffing
Read More
The Story He Told
He didn’t look like a killer. Not that there really is a killer look. It’s more that having met so many—interviewed so many—you start to get a feeling. There are the self-justifying ‘she deserved it’ killers; the fatalistic ‘that’s the way things go’ killers; the spurned lover killers ‘I loved her so much no one else could have her’; and the sociopathic, narcissistic killers without conscience. The last group is great fodder for detective television. They are mean, smart, successful, criminal masterminds OR they are brutish killing machines. Either way, they do not see the women they kill as human—more
Read More
