Scrap: Salvaging a Family by Luanne Castle - Review

What can I say about such a wonderful and poignant memoir, and so uniquely told through flash non-fiction? I do not read many memoirs. I would read more if they were written like this one. If I ever write one, you can be sure that I will approach in a similar way.

Luanne's relationship with her father was very complicated. My heart screamed for her as she related her experiences of bearing the brunt of his anger. This short snippet from page 76 expresses her experience in just a few sentences:

"I have never felt unloved. Hated, frightened, anxious, and claustrophobic, yes. But not unloved. I need to remember this every day. I'll make and tie a memory bracelet around my left wrist so I see it whenever I do anything."

This book speaks of generational trauma, and the psychological effects of a society that places stigma on certain realities such as being born out of wedlock, etc. When Rudy (Luanne's father) was born to an unmarried woman and given a last name that typically indicates being a "bastard." that stigma followed him his entire life and was where his anger stemmed from. 

It was heartening to see that Luanne and Rudy had established a peace between them in later years. Though their relationship remained complicated, it was clear that love was always present, even if it was not always communicated effectively.

My mom is a memoir reader and I plan to pass this book to her. I know she will enjoy it, and she will also relate to an extent, as she had a complicated relationship with her father. She often speaks of dealing with his anger when she was growing up. Unfortunately, she never received the apology she should have, but my grandfather died suddenly so I'd like to think that it may have happened at some point. I know they did have a better relationship as he grew older, but it was reticent at best because they didn't really see each other often. 

I thank Luanne for sharing her life with us readers. Reading this book was definitely an experience. I feel it will lead me to examine the relationship with my father, which has become complicated in adulthood due to circumstances I'll stay silent on for now.

I highly recommend this book. You'll be missing out if you don't read it.

Read Luanne's guest post on her interesting writing process here.

Read my review of her poetry collection, Our Wolves, here.

About the Book

The hybrid flash memoir Scrap: Salvaging a Family explores the stain of childhood fear and anxiety on the adult spirit and the experience of reconciling with an aging or dying parent. A daughter has grown up in a household with an angry and abusive father. He keeps the secret of his biological father’s identity from his daughter for decades. When the elderly man faces his mortality, he finally names his father. The more the daughter learns about her father’s early life and origins, the more she understands him which leads to forgiveness for the past.

Advance Praise

“Borne of shame and trauma, the secrets uncovered in Luanne Castle’s hybrid memoir reveal her father’s complicated childhood and the impact it had on their relationship. Told in brief, strikingly vivid fragments, and through various perspectives and forms, the book as a whole presents a deeply moving and unforgettable account. We readers are privileged to bear witness to this emotional excavation, one that ultimately reminds us that love is powerful even when it’s painful and that forgiveness is the only way forward. Scrap: Salvaging a Family is a gorgeous and brilliantly original collection. I highly recommend it.” ~Kathy Fish, author of Wild Life: Collected Works

The book is available at ELJ Editions and on Amazon.

About the Author

Luanne Castle’s poetry and prose have appeared in Copper Nickel, River Teeth, Your Impossible Voice, JMWW, Grist, Fourteen Hills, Verse Daily, Disappointed Housewife, Lunch Ticket, Saranac Review, Pleiades, Cleaver, Moon City, Moon Park, Anti-Heroin Chic, Bending Genres, BULL, The Mackinaw, The Ekphrastic Review, Phoebe, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Gone Lawn, Burningword, Superstition Review, One Art, Roi Fainéant, Dribble Drabble, Flash Boulevard, O:JA&L, Sheila-Na-Gig, Thimble, Antigonish Review, Longridge, Paragraph Planet, Six Sentences, Gooseberry Pie, Switch, and Ginosko. Her story, “Garden Seasons,” was selected for Best Microfiction 2026. She has published four award-winning poetry collections, and her ekphrastic flash and poetry collection Hunting the Cosmos is forthcoming from Shanti Arts in fall 2026. Learn more at luannecastle.com.

Visit the tour page to read more reviews here.

Never miss a post!

* indicates required

Email Address *

Classics Club Spin #44

And the spin landed on #9...King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table, Roger Lancelyn Green to be finished by July 5.

I can't believe I missed the last three spins. Life has been busy. I also revised my entire list and started over effective May 16, 2026. See my updated list on my dedicated Classics Club page here.

What is the spin?

At your blog, before Sunday, May 17 create a post that lists twenty books of your choice that remain "to be read" on your Classics Club list.

This is your Spin List.

You have to read one of these twenty books by the end of the spin period.

On Sunday, May 17, we'll post a number from 1 through 20. The challenge is to read whatever book falls under that number on your Spin List by July 5, 2026.

For full details and to join in, visit the Classics Club blog here.

My List

1. In Search of Dracula, R.T. McNally/Radu R. Florescu
2. The Monk, Matthew Lewis
3. The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle
4. Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
5. The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories, Algernon Blackwood
6. Come Along With Me, Shirley Jackson
7. The Witch of Ravensworth, George Brewer
8. Mildred Pierce, James Cain
9. King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table, Roger Lancelyn Green
10. The Wasps, The Poet and the Women, The Frogs (Three Plays), Aristophanes
11. The Phantom of the Opera, Gaston Leroux
12. 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke
13. The Bad Seed, William March
14. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Gawain Poet (Simon Armitage - Translator)
15. The Theban Plays, Sophocles
16. The Silmarillon, J.R.R. Tolkien
17. The Lost World, Arthur Conan Doyle
18. Grendel, John Gardner
19. Twelve Years a Slave, Solomon Northrup
20. A Mirror for Witches, Esther Forbes

Never miss a post!

* indicates required

Email Address *

Guest Post: Poet and Author, Luanne Castle

Michelle asked me to write about my writing process and how it differs from my other published works. I love this question because yes, the process for Scrap: Salvaging a Family is very different from the process for my four poetry collections.

Because my writing focus has primarily been poetry and, more recently, flash fiction (less than 1,000 words), the writing projects I would envision were quite small. I get an idea for a poem from an observation or experience, or sometimes from a writing prompt generated by another poet. I usually submit my poems to journals for publication.

Poem published by Storyteller Poetry Review 

takes up where a flash story in Scrap ends (p. 16).

For my two full-length collections, Doll God and Rooted and Winged: after I had a fair number of journal publications, I printed out all the poems that had been published as well as those which had not but that I particularly liked. Then I studied them for themes. Once I had my themes for the books, I knew which poems to include and which ones to leave out.

Sometimes, I start to obsess over a particular topic. That is how my two chapbooks formed. After I wrote two dozen poems based on my genealogy research, I compiled a manuscript that became Kin Types. Our Wolves came together from my fascination with the story of “Little Red Riding Hood.”

So where does Scrap, a hybrid memoir that relies on flash nonfiction more than any other genre, come into the above process?

Eighteen years ago, I decided to write a memoir about my father and my relationship with him. I had been writing poetry most of my life and had studied the subject for my MFA degree. But I had no clue how to write a memoir. So, I decided to learn and began to take online memoir workshops through Gotham, Stanford, and Apiary Lit (which appears to be defunct).

Think of it this way, the process of writing Scrap was a different journey of my life than writing poetry. I wrote both simultaneously, but for a very long time, these two paths did not cross. I wrote at least two different versions of a traditional chaptered memoir. It might have been three. I struggled at first with the definition of memoir as “memory plus reflection,” meaning what happened and what did the writer learn from it. Reflection is far from what a poet does. Poetry is more like sketching, shaping something “slant,” to use Emily Dickinson’s expression. Reflection requires the writer to directly confront memories to learn from them.

Ten years into wrestling with Scrap, I started to write flash fiction. Flash fiction isn’t a shorter than usual short story, but its own genre. Flash fiction has as much in common with poetry as it does with short stories. After I felt comfortable with flash, I realized that flash nonfiction made more sense than chapters to me as a vehicle for my memories. And once I opened my mind to flash for memoir, I realized that a hybrid or combination of genres could also be useful. For instance, much of the reflection in Scrap is told through mini “essays” where I directly discuss certain memories and revelations.

Photo of flash story “What Goes Into Being a Father,” 

published in Bull. This story references events in Scrap.

In this way, my poetry path and my memoir path have merged into Scrap: Salvaging a Family, a book that feels true to me and my identity.

A big thank you to Luanne for sharing her writing process. I'm always interested in an author's method.

Stay tuned for my review of Scrap, coming Tuesday, May 19.

Never miss a post!

* indicates required

Email Address *