Salon.com > Jennifer Gilmore

Halloween 2012: What’s scary?

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 22:11:00 +0000

Halloween is the strangest of holidays, the day we actually invite the creepy, the spooky, the downright scary into our lives — as if we aren't surrounded by enough horror, with many of us just now emerging from the very real, unwanted terror of Hurricane Sandy. But there is something strangely alluring about having control over your own fear, to make it into a fantasy, whether it involves walking through a haunted house, or dressing up for a costume party, or watching horror films, knowing that you can hide under your coat, run out of the theater, or hit STOP.

We've asked six of our favorite writers to open up and tell us what freaked them out when they were younger — and what scares them now.

The essays include (click on the title to read each piece):

"Real-Life Body-Snatchers," by Peter Trachtenberg

The author of "The Book of Calamities" sees body-snatchers. All the time.

"The Horrors of Aging," by Kate Christensen

The PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novelist used to love Halloween. But now every dangling skeleton and rotting pumpkin in the neighborhood is reminding her of her own mortality.

Fearing fear itself

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 21:00:00 +0000

I slept in the attic. I was put up there when I was 5 and my sister was born and she took over my room. The attic is a haven in a lot of ways — I am atop my family and can hear them moving below; I have a window seat and I can look down on the world, see the kids playing kick the can, riding their banana-seated bikes down the hill, ringing their bells, and I can watch the old people leaning into each other, walking hand in hand after dinner.

I soon realize, though, that the world doesn’t look back up. No one can see me. I have just seen “Beauty and the Beast” at Wolf Trap, the performing arts center in Washington, D.C., where I have also seen “The Music Man,” “Hello Dolly” and “The Phantom Tollbooth.” I loved these productions so much that I have signed up for a drama workshop here. But when it’s my turn to improvise onstage, I giggle with so much self-consciousness, I am told by the drama instructor to get off the stage. “You need to get into your character,” she says. “Who are you going to be?” Alas, I have always, only, been myself.

No. 6: Jennifer Gilmore’s “Something Red”

Fri, 11 Feb 2011 16:01:00 +0000

They took a room in the Marriott Hotel, along East-West Highway in Silver Spring, just a few miles from where she had lived for the past thirteen years. The room was twelve floors above the conference where they had each pledged to have no relations with other LEAP!ers for thirty days in order to let the high of the tenets dissipate a bit. One needs a more solid head, the leader had said. To decide such things.

Elias opened her blouse slowly, twisting each button with his thumb and third finger, then running his finger along her breastbone. When her shirt finally fell open, he studied her, then caressed her breasts. Was he putting her on? He licked her nipples, then moved his lips slowly down her stomach, and Sharon couldn’t have cared less if he was. Elias removed her underwear, and kissing her just above her pubic bone, he slipped two fingers inside her. Sharon moved into his hands until he stopped suddenly, removing his fingers as if he’d thought better of the whole thing. While Sharon propped herself up on her elbows to see what had happened, Elias got up and opened his wallet. Was he moving to pay her? Before? Or worse -- and now she thought of Midnight Cowboy, she’d been so scandalized by that film -- was he expecting her to pay him? She wondered how much a man like Elias would cost.

Nina Simone

Tue, 20 Jun 2000 15:23:00 +0000

It was less than a decade ago that I first heard Nina Simone sing. It was Bob Dylan's "I Shall Be Released," and though I'd heard countless vocalists cover Dylan's songs, never before had I experienced such a complex rendition as hers. There was something about the heaviness in the timbre of Simone's voice and the lightness of her fingers on the piano keys that produced a sound of tremendous joy and tremendous sorrow -- simultaneously. Since that day, I haven't gone a week without listening to her.

Simone's admirers have found their way to her from a range of places, and that diversity is reflected in her music. She plays blues, jazz, protest songs, gospel, pop, hymns and folk tunes. She covers the songs of the Beatles, Jacques Brel, Leonard Cohen, George Gershwin, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Duke Ellington and the Bee Gees, and yet every song she sings is her own.

Ghost organ

Mon, 08 May 2000 16:00:00 +0000

At the veterinary school on the campus of Cornell University, there is a cow with an 8-inch diameter hole cut out of her. By unscrewing a plastic cap where her hide is cut away, students can see into her stomach. When I was 25 and in my first year of graduate school in the English department there, we all climbed down into the gorge, walked over the wobbly, suspended bridge and went to the school for a look into the cow. At my turn, my eye squinted through the opening and my finger traced the line of her digestion in the air. "Look how she goes!" I thought. I had no idea that my own inward functionings would soon be on display.

One morning that same year, I woke up with an ileostomy, a 10-inch plastic bag -- the kind you would use to store vegetables in the freezer -- hanging from the right side of my belly. But this one was for collecting waste. I had been in the hospital for more than a month with ulcerative colitis, an inflammation of the inner lining of the colon. My large intestine had grown like rising bread, until it became mega-toxic, on the brink of explosion. The night my stomach became so hard that to rap on its surface would yield an echo of knocked wood, the surgeon came in and marked a spot where the bag would attach. He used a plain old Bic pen to make an "X," and I got wheeled quickly into the operating room.