An Essay By My Late Mom, Candace Wilson Culp
Along with a note from me, plus 1970s tourist postcards of Morocco
In May, the journal Off Assignment published an essay by my mother Candace Wilson Culp, who was still finalizing the piece with the editors at the time of her unexpected passing in January of this year. This is her first officially published essay, a lifelong dream of hers that I am so sad she did not get to see.
It’s impossible to summarize any life, but especially my Mom’s, as she lived so many different ones in her 76 years. At the time of her death she was working on telling her own story in a memoir, which my family and I are working to collect and publish. After a tumultuous childhood, she was raised by a cocktail-waitress single mother in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Before she finished high school, she was already working in local fashion shows as a model, and at casinos like The Sands and the Riviera as a showgirl. Eager to leave the dusty mob town of late 60s Vegas for the bigger world, at 19 she followed modeling work to Manhattan and soon onto Europe.
This essay recounts an episode from that time in her life, a story she actually never told me until I was much older than she had been when it happened. She was 23 years old, newly arrived in Spain and newly in love, and decided to go along with an ill-advised plan of her new boyfriend and his friend out of, as she described it later, sheer naïveté and the desire to be valued. For some people, a story of smuggling hash would become a go-to cocktail party story, retold and embellished over the years as a tale of wild and brazen youth. But for my Mom, raised a good Catholic girl, she always looked back on this incident with embarrassment and astonishment, and even five decades later, a faint chill of how things could have gone so wrong so fast—but somehow did not. It was a pivotal near miss in a lifetime of both good luck and bad. Ever since she first told me the story, I’ve viewed it with so much tenderness toward who my Mom was at that time, and toward any of us who have felt lost and alone in the world, and seeking acceptance and belonging at all costs.
*Read the essay here*
Also at the Off Assignment link is a short bio of my Mom, and if you’re interested to receive updates on her writing and legacy, you can sign up at candacewilsonculp.com .
In addition, I suggest exploring all the incredible writing that is now part of the Off Assignment archives, including the 162 and counting “Letter to a Stranger” columns that my Mom’s piece is part of (you can also read the one I wrote in 2020, “To the Eye Doctor in Osaka”), and check out the first print anthology released in 2022. Here is also a lovely note from founding editor Colleen Kinder on the inception of the prompt and the project.
Even under such bittersweet circumstances, it was an honor to work with the brilliant Off Assignment editors to prepare my Mom’s piece for publication, particularly Aube Rey Lescure, whose own incredible debut book “River East River West” is one of my favorite novels in ages - a moving coming-of-age story that’s also that also captures the electric melancholy of early 2010’s Shanghai in a way little other fiction has so far. I highly recommend picking up a copy of “River East River West” here.
Bonus: “The Tourist’s Morocco”
In her essay, my Mom describes her arrival in Tétouan at a “touristy resort”, but as the journey progresses to Ketama in the Atlas mountains, she gets a glimpse of a different layer of the country - “this was not the tourist’s Morocco”. There are no photos of the Moroccan trip in question, but in her files, I found these vintage postcards of Morocco that it seems she purchased on the trip but never sent. I’ve scanned a few here:
In closing, among other charities my Mom cared about and supported, her final donation before she passed was to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund - if you’re able, consider donating here.
Your mother has that “it” quality. Great!