Last week was a tough one, not because anything bad happened. It was just a lot for me physically and even mentally.
We celebrated Mother’s Day a week late at my son and DIL’s house. Son and SIL made fish tacos and daughter made guacamole and gluten free raspberry almond cake. But all day I felt a bit off, as if I was going to get a vestibular migraine attack. In case you are coming late to this VM stuff, it’s not a headache–I used to get regular migraine headaches until they morphed into the annihilator weapon of migraines. They are all kinds of awful, and while it’s going on I am lying there covering my vision and hearing with pillows, sweating up a storm, and wishing I were dead. And vomiting. In total, there are about twenty symptoms.
But I didn’t get one that day or the next. I got it on Tuesday and wasted the whole day doing the above (pillows, sweat, symptoms, etc.). Then my daughter brought her two kitties over for me to babysit while she and hubby went to Hawaii (something wrong with this situation).
Wednesday my grandson got out of school for the summer. His camp doesn’t start until today, so guess who had him all the while I was still shaky and walking around in migraine glasses, not thinking clearly.
However, we had FUN.
On Friday, Hudson was in one of those two-year-old moods where he wanted his stuffie and binky more than just naptime. In this photo, I asked him to take out the binky for one second to have his picture taken. This is the shot he gave me.
We took him to Dairy Queen, and I told him ahead of time he had to leave the binky at home but he could take his stuffie friend. When I said it was time to go to the car he carefully tucked both items in “his” drawer and pointed out to me that he was leaving the stuffie, TOO. He was so proud of himself.
IF YOU WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT SCRAP: SALVAGING A FAMILY
Below is an update of the book tour for Scrap: Salvaging a Family. I am sharing a quote from each blog post in the hopes that as a whole they give a good idea of what it’s like to read the book and what you would find inside the front and back cover. Here are the links with a quote from each:
Tour Schedule for Scrap: Salvaging a Family (memoir in flash):
March 21: Joy Neal Kidney (review)
[T]he father of the author, an unpredictable, frightening, and sometimes violent man who often took out his rage on Luanne, his only daughter. What a complicated childhood, one without answers . . . . [The] answers finally seeped out later in life, with both father and daughter attempting to make sense of the complicated scraps of their shared past. The author bravely gives glimpses of early years, therapy years, and later years with candor and compassion, and amazing resilience.
March 23: Liz Gauffreau, (review)
The memoir has been structured with intention and a high level of craft in its component parts.The three sections of Scrap follow the narrative arc of a three-act play: “Early Years” as set-up, “Therapy” as confrontation, and “Later Years” as resolution. Similarly, the mode of expression for each section is well-aligned with its content: flash for “Early Years,” interrogative dialog for “Therapy,” and narrative prose for “Years Later.” There are also poems to provide even more emotional depth in key places. Some of the flash pieces are “imaginings,” when Castle puts herself in Rudy’s and her beloved grandmother’s place as another step on the path to insight and understanding.
March 24: Marie Ann Bailey, (review)
Early on in Scrap, we are introduced to Rudy’s “wolf teeth” and “wolf mask.” Later, we are horrified by bouts of his physical and emotional violence. And yet there are moments of tenderness, of love. And moments of Rudy’s pain and suffering that Luanne excavates for us. Luanne gives voice to her father’s own difficult childhood, his concerns for the starving children he came across while serving in Korea, his relationship with his grandchildren. Rudy is a complicated man but isn’t every man complicated? Isn’t every woman complicated? And don’t they become less complicated the more we understand them?
March 25: John W. Howell, (excerpt–below is the first section of the excerpt)
Daddy moves his workbench to the garage by hoisting the heavy counter up the stairs on a dolly. He lets me carry a leg, but when I stumble, he says I should just watch. He removes all the tools, the scrap wood, even the army sleeping bags from the basement. The space heater in the garage makes the new workshop too dangerous for me. The elves abandon us. Daddy drives home a truckload of cement blocks and carries each brick down the stairs by himself. Each brick holds a secret that I can’t share with anyone. He stacks the blocks in a quadrant-shaped domino pattern, building walls two bricks deep. Without mortar, the bricks resemble my wooden blocks. Rosemary Clooney croons for us to come to her house.
March 30: Miriam Hurdle, (companion story by Luanne–below is first paragraph)
Dad held the blanketed bundle in his arms as if it were a baby. When he unwrapped the violin, I murmured in anticipation, reaching out to stroke the reddish-brown wood. Dad urged me to be careful but nodded at my eagerness. He asked if I knew what it was.
March 31: Review Tales (review)
One of the memoir’s greatest strengths is its refusal to simplify reconciliation. Forgiveness here is not sentimental. It is gradual, complicated, and earned through insight. As the daughter learns about her father’s early life and hidden history, empathy emerges—not as weakness, but as strength. The book becomes a meditation on how knowledge reshapes memory and how understanding can soften even deeply embedded wounds.
April 2: the bookworm (review)
This was my first time reading a memoir written entirely in poetry (sic) and I was fascinated by it. Luanne Castle shares her life from childhood through present. Highlighted is her relationship with her family, her mother, her brother and in particular her father. As I read I thought how brave she is for putting these personal experiences on the page. Her poetry is beautiful and moving and I found several favorite lines.
April 9: Ashley’s Books, Cozy Home Delight (review)
It is fascinating to see how a person grows into themselves when they did not come from a perfect or even safe environment. She shows that it is possible to come from something painful and still become someone whole. That part stayed with me just as much as the harder moments did.
April 13: What’s That Book About (guest post by Luanne)
In the version of Little Red that I concocted in my head, the wolf hid inside of my father and only showed himself when my father became red-faced and angry. That’s when his big wolf teeth would pop out: “the wolf teeth inside him are shifty and unpredictable” (p. 12). When that happened, Little Red needed to look out! That I was Little Red was obvious to me as I felt small and innocent and helpless.
April 15: Tabi Thoughts(review)
Scrap is also beautifully honest and vulnerable, especially considering it addresses topics that are difficult to write about. As someone who also wants to one day write about difficult, confusing, challenging yet transformative memories, I really appreciate Luanne’s ability to share her story so openly while also exploring multiple perspectives. Luanne’s writing felt intimate, almost like reading journal entries or flipping through a scrapbook of memories which gives it a raw and reflective tone. What stood out most to me was her relationship with her father. It was powerful reading about how she navigated the pain of his shortcomings while acknowledging his own pain and how his childhood shaped him as a parent.
April 23: Lavender Orchids (review)
What stayed with me most was how the form mirrors the content. The fragments feel intentional, like the only honest way to tell this story. Childhood here isn’t softened or romanticised. It’s confusing, sometimes tender, often unsettling. The writing doesn’t over-explain, and that restraint works in its favour. You’re not told how to feel, but you feel it anyway.
April 27: The Reading Bud (review)
Scrap: Salvaging a Family by Luanne Castle is a fragmented, lyrical, and emotionally precise memoir that sifts through family memory, inherited shame, childhood fear, and the difficult work of understanding a parent without excusing the harm they caused. Written as a “memoir in flash,” the book is built out of short, vivid pieces, named as scraps of childhood, domestic scenes, remembered violence, questions, photographs, family stories, documents, and imagined reconstructions, all stitched together into something devastating and incredibly artful.
May 4: Chelsea’s Books (review)
Castle’s writing is beautiful. I love the “memoir in flash” style, each vignette is tight and succinct without an unnecessary word and yet they are so profound. I was really taken with her ability.
May 4: Smorgasbord (excerpt–below is the first paragraph of the excerpt)
In the spring, we run like besieged villagers from the DDT planes following us down the street, our parents’ warnings sirening in our heads, the nose-tingling smell of gasoline pelting our hair and our jackets. Come summer, the onslaught is more insidious as plumes chugged out by the smokestacks at the pill factory coat the sky, masking the stink of the city dump behind the houses on our side of the street.
May 6: Brotman Blog (review)
Have you ever picked up a book, not knowing what to expect, and become so wrapped up in the story and the writing that you just don’t want to put it down? That was my experience reading Luanne Castle’s newest book Scrap: Salvaging a Family. From the first page until I finished it, I was spellbound.
May 7: The Reading Bud (interview with Luanne)
I do love taking workshops. My husband jokingly calls me a “professional student.” The constraints involved with writing to prompts assigned by someone else stimulate my imagination and keep me focused so that I don’t have too many decisions to make. The routine is to sit in front of the computer and start writing when I can find at least a half hour. Kitchen or office, it doesn’t matter, although the kitchen is easier because I can keep an eye on what else needs doing. I’ve never really had long periods of solitude to write. Maybe that’s why I tend to write poetry and flash.
May 14: True Book Addict (guest post by Luanne)
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.
May 15: Storyteller Poetry Review (review and excerpts)
Fellow Arizonian, Luanne Castle is a masterful storyteller so it was no surprise to me when I couldn’t put down her unique well written memoir, “Scrap: Salvaging a Family,” until I had read it from cover to cover. With powerful and poignant poems and flash fiction she tells the story of her chaotic childhood in description and dialogue so vivid it was like watching a movie.
May 19: True Book Addict (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.
May 20: Merril D. Smith (review)
I read it through in one afternoon. I couldn’t stop; I was so caught up in the story! The book begins with the revelation that her father was a bastard. Castle explains the several meanings of the word, and how in the time and place in which her father grew up, it was a stigma that left him shamed and angry. To me, it seems that secrecy more than illegitimacy produced generations of suffering. Castle’s father’s father was a well-respected doctor who not only had this secret family, but who also doctored his own past.
May 21: The Book Connection (review)
Wow! This memoir doesn’t tug at the heartstrings. It plucks them hard and snaps a few. Scrap: Salvaging A Family is deep, it’s emotional, it cracks open family secrets, and it explores family hardships that impact generations. Masterfully written, readers follow one woman’s examination of her childhood trauma brought on by events that occurred well before she was born.
May 26: Author Anthony Avina (review)
May 28: Author Anthony Avina (guest post)
There are also a few beautiful reviews on Goodreads and Amazon that are not part of the blog tour. I use the term “blog tour” loosely meaning if it appeared on a blog or by a bookstagrammer, then it’s part of the tour.
BUT LET ME ASSURE YOU SCRAP NEEDS MORE REVIEWS ON AMAZON AND GOODREADS AND IF THEY EVER FIX MY DISTRIBUTION CONNECTION ON BOOKBUB, TOO.
It took me eighteen years from the first story I wrote about my father’s workshop in our basement until publication for Scrap: Salvaging a Family. Some of that time was “down time,” including from the day ELJ Editions accepted the manuscript until it was actually published. So in the meantime I was writing other things, usually poetry, but some micro or flash fiction, too.
