Tag Archives: Family

by Luanne | July 13, 2026 · 6:06 am

Tornado Salvaging

Sharing a few more photos I found scanning.

There are two micro stories in Scrap: Salvaging a Family about the May 13, 1980 tornado in Kalamazoo, Michigan (pp 90-92 in paperback). It’s sort of a transition period in the book where I am now an adult, albeit young, whereas what had come before in the book was focused on coming-of-age. It’s also foreshadowed by an earlier scene of being a kid in the basement during a tornado warning. Scrap is comprised of three parts, and the tornado is the end of part I.

I mention how my father bought up storefronts that nobody else seemed to want and tried to fix them up just enough to rent them as he had little money to invest in remodelling. I describe a wooden “canvas” hanging on the wall of my father’s store:

What I think is that he makes something usable that wasn’t. He doesn’t have the money to make them beautiful. But every once in a while, he recognizes something that is. Inside the luggage store, he’s hung a board that a painter used to clean his brushes. He calls it his Jackson Pollack (sic).

Weirdly, even though I remember looking up the correct spelling of the artist’s name, I still misspelled it in the book. For some reason, I want it to be spelled Pollack instead of Pollock. Maybe it’s because for all its interesting details it’s still a fake. (If you read Scrap you might realize why the theme of “fake” resonates with me).

Dad’s “Jackson Pollock” on the wall

Here are a couple of photos of the tornado that day.

Gilmore Brothers department store–the entire back wall of the 5 story building was blown off

ISB Bank building–all the windows were blown out

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Filed under #ScrapSalvagingFamily, coming of age, Family, Family history, flash memoir, Flash Nonfiction, History, hybrid memoir, Memoir, Nonfiction, Scrap:Salvaging a Family

Tagged as #ScrapSalvagingFamily, coming of age, Family, family history, flash memoir, History, Memoir, Scrap: Salvaging a Family, Tornado

by Luanne | July 10, 2026 · 6:28 am

Thank you, Beetley Pete!

Beetley Pete has let me take a space on his blog today to share a story a bit related to Scrap: Salvaging a Family. It’s a story my father and uncle told me (together) when they were 85. My uncle and my parents were visiting me at the same time, and they were getting into unearthing memories. This one is about the 1920s, 30s, 40s, and there are photos from the early days.

POST ON PETE’S BLOG

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Filed under #ScrapSalvagingFamily, Family, Family history, flash memoir, Flash Nonfiction, Memoir, SCRAP: SALVAGING A FAMILY

Tagged as #ScrapSalvagingFamily, Family, family history, flash memoir, lies, Memoir, memories, Scrap: Salvaging a Family, secrets

by Luanne | July 8, 2026 · 6:00 am

A Photo Update to An Old Story

In my old photo scanning I have found a photo I didn’t know existed. But I had heard about the subject of the picture. In fact, I wrote about it on this blog in 2012 and then re-blogged it in 2013. It’s in a story I wrote about spending time with my maternal grandmother. I’ll repost the story here. At the end I’ll post the photo I found because by the end of the story you will know why I thought it was such a great find.

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When I was little I stayed with my grandmother during the day while my parents were at work. It was just Grandma and me at the house. Grandpa worked down the block, at his Sunoco filling station. Every day at noon, Grandma and I brought his lunch to him. He’d climb up out of the pit where he worked under cars and smile when he saw us with his gray lunch box.

Sometimes I played with the girl up the street and other days I’d pick through the toys and books left behind in their bedrooms upstairs by my mother, Aunt Alice, and Uncle Don. I found a giant printing set, a potholder loom and loops, and a collection of miniature furniture and animals. In my aunt’s room, I read my first chapter book, The Bobbsey Twins. Grandma and I fried donuts and sugared strawberries. We sang Ethel Merman songs like “Anything You Can Do.” I could always manage to sing louder and higher than Grandma.

Any note you can reach
I can go higher.
I can sing anything
Higher than you.
No, you can’t. (High)
Yes, I can. (Higher) No, you can’t. (Higher)
Yes, I CAN! (Highest)

Occasionally, we walked “uptown” to the bank, passing the thrift store, which fascinated me. I thought it was a combination antique store and fine dress shop. Also en route was the home of the Purple People Eaters. My overweight, matronly grandmother sang the song and danced right there on the sidewalk for me. It was years before I realized the building was actually a dry cleaning establishment, painted purple.

Grandma carried the filling station’s bank deposit bag in her big pocketbook, which also held mints and pennies for me. We stopped at the florist to say hi to some relatives and at the bakery for sugar cookies.

With all the fun Grandma orchestrated, I still got bored one time. I was in “that mood,” the one where it seems that all is wrong with the world. Grandma knew how to handle the situation. She put me in an old work shirt of Grandpa’s and handed me a paint brush.

“Come outside,” she said. On the back stoop, she’d placed an old wooden child’s chair on a spread-out newspaper. “Go to town, Luanne,” she said. I worked hard for a long time, painting that chair, which seemed so big

When my mother picked me up after work that day, she laughed. “Mom, you had her do the same thing you made Don do to keep him busy!” Even today when I feel “at odds,” this example keeps me working, moving forward through the doldrums.

Grandma did her chores while I was at her house. She cooked and baked and ran errands, which were all on foot or by bus, as she didn’t drive. I helped her and learned at her elbow. She ironed my parents’ clothes, too, while I played at the kitchen table and sang with her. She didn’t waste our time cleaning too much, but everything else got done—and done well.

She devoted a half hour to herself every day, watching As the World Turns while I “napped” beside her on the couch.

Mostly, though, Grandma doted on me and made sure I could learn and use my imagination. She sat me on her lap and told me stories “from her head.” Her attention wasn’t fragmented by a cell phone or computer. She limited her telephone and TV usage. She was completely there in the moment with me each day.

Can we say the same today for our children and grandchildren and the children we babysit?

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Here is the addendum to the story. A photo showing Uncle Don painting the same chair! This would have been about 1941.

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Filed under Family, Family history, Grandparenting, Memoir, Nonfiction, Writing

Tagged as Family, family history, grandparenting, Memoir, Purple People Eater, vintage photos

by Luanne | July 3, 2026 · 9:55 am

Scrap’s Ebook Now on Amazon!

Great news about Scrap! You can now order the ebook on Amazon!

Sorry for shouting! I’m just excited. Here’s the link:

ORDER SCRAP IN EBOOK

ORDER SCRAP IN PAPERBACK

If you haven’t read Scrap: Salvaging a Family I hope you will. And if you have, I hope you like it and will share with others who might like it or find it helpful, especially with generational trauma, family dysfunction and abuse, or writing outside the boundaries of genre.

If you’ve written a review for Scrap and are on BookBub, the book will show up there soon–it’s pending approval. I’d appreciate it if you could copy your review over there!

Years ago I was writing posts inspired by the Dawn Raffel book The Secret Life of Objects. My magical music box, one of the objects, has shown up in Scrap. I still own it, too! Actually I wrote about it twice on this blog. The first time was to introduce the music box. At that time I didn’t know what music it plays. The second time was after I discovered the song it plays: La Paloma.

Magical Music Box

The Origin of Poetry

You know what I just realized? I’ve never let Hudson hear or even see the music box. He spent the night last weekend and then was here all day yesterday because school was closed. He’s almost 2.5. Can you believe it?!

I’ll have to share the music box with him. He loves music, and I want him to experience it as I did.

Yesterday we went to storytime at the library (lots of exercise for Grandma as story is more like “story” called movement), got lunch with chocolate milk, swam (with Grandpa), played with Mickey Mouse playdough (his favorite character is not the usual for kids today–it’s Minnie Mouse!), played the piano, and painted. Of course painted. He insisted and kept bringing it up. He paints with acrylics on canvas so it’s quite a mess. But another beautiful painting was added to his portfolio.

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Filed under #seekgathercreate, Art and Music, Book Review, Family, Family history, flash memoir, Flash Nonfiction, Grandparenting, hybrid memoir, Memoir, Nonfiction, SCRAP: SALVAGING A FAMILY

Tagged as #ScrapSalvagingFamily, book review, child's art, Dawn Raffel, Family, family history, flash memoir, flash nonfiction, grandparenting, hybrid memoir, Memoir, Nonfiction, Scrap: Salvaging a Family, The Secret Life of Objects

by Luanne | June 24, 2026 · 10:31 am

The Economy of a Poet

Like so many, I feel a real affinity for the poetry of Sylvia Plath. She’s my favorite poet as Shirley Jackson is my favorite prose writer and Remedios Varo is my favorite artist.

For my MFA explication I wrote about the Plath poem “Fever 103.” I still love that poem which so well captures that feeling of having a high fever without really talking about fever or being ill.

For my PhD dissertation, each chapter was focused on one female poet and one type of identity. For my Plath chapter I wrote about performing gender.

Later, when I began to write more poetry, I could feel the influence of Plath’s poetry on me.

Most inspirational for me was how candid and direct her poetry sounds. And under the surface, I suppose, was her search for who her father was and how he connected to her. These features really guided me in writing Scrap: Salvaging a Family. But they also helped in creating this collage for Raw Lit, Issue 9. The Making of a Daddy which relies upon the imagery from two poems Plath wrote about her father: “Daddy” and “The Colossus.”

***

“Spare, precise, and quietly devastating, this is the kind of memoir that stays in the body long after the reading is done.”

That’s what the editorial review at The Book Review calls my memoir.

The Book Revue – 5 Star Review

Here’s another favorite paragraph:

“Her prose has the economy of a poet who knows exactly which word is doing the work and which ones can be cut. She has a remarkable ability to locate enormous emotion inside small, specific objects and moments, a trait that is genuinely rare and that gives the book its distinctive texture.”

ORDER SCRAP IN EBOOK OR PAPERBACK

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Filed under #ScrapSalvagingFamily, Art and Music, Book Review, coming of age, ELJ Editions, Family, Family history, flash memoir, Flash Nonfiction, hybrid memoir, Memoir, Nonfiction, Scrap:Salvaging a Family, Writing

Tagged as #ScrapSalvagingFamily, book review, coming of age, ELJ Editions, Family, family history, flash memoir, flash nonfiction, hybrid memoir, Memoir, Nonfiction, Raw Lit, Scrap: Salvaging a Family, Sylvia Plath

by Luanne | May 20, 2026 · 7:07 am

Merril’s Review

A big thank you to Merril D. Smith for her heartfelt review of my memoir Scrap:Salvaging a Family.

MERRIL’S REVIEW OF SCRAP

Best Friends!!!

Once my memoir was published I felt free to think over my life again, mind unfettered by writing about it, and it occurred to me how important female friends have been to me.

I’m not one to generally enjoy hanging out with a group of women unless I am actual friends with each of them. Once there is anyone else in the (small) group who I don’t know it becomes more difficult for me. I’ve written before about being a Highly Sensitive Person. Maybe it’s just introversion. Or social anxiety. My ADHD. Or maybe I’m on the spectrum–there are certainly enough autism “tests” available online that would put me there. (Seriously, I think this is really unfair to people with real autism). Anyway, I prefer my friends one on one. That way I can focus on that person and not feel sidetracked and overstimulated by too much going on.

I had a best friend in first grade. Her name was Michelle, and we were both the best readers in our class. She was fun and smart and had an older sister so Michelle was a little old for her age. She even had a Chatty Cathy doll that talked. Or was it a Betsy Wetsy who wet her pants? We got split up in third grade, and I made two new friends, but I wasn’t close to them as I was to Michelle, whereas it appeared to me that Michelle went on to make lots of best friends in her class.

After we moved, I met Jill. We both loved to read mysteries and Gene Stratton Porter books which were wonderful for the approach to nature, but had some virulent racism in them. Nobody was monitoring our reading! We played in the woods and collected what we found. Jill not only was in my fourth grade class, but she was in my Sunday School class as well.

But then we moved again. The friend I met that first week in the new house was the girl next door. She is the first friend who shows up in Scrap. She is one of the only characters in the book where I changed her name and called her Ellen. The reason I did that is because Ellen died at age nineteen of ovarian cancer. Her stepbrother is also in the book, and he also died too young. I don’t know why I made this decision, but somehow I know it’s because of Ellen’s death. Although by the time she passed, we had already moved away again and had gone to different high schools. Ellen attended my wedding, but we were no longer close. I ended up seeing her a few weeks before she died, when she was looking for a suitcase to take back and forth to the hospital. Then I went to the visitation at the funeral home, a very distressing event.

Ellen’s sarcasm and sharp wit helped me get through some difficult 10-12 year old times with my father. She spoke up to my father, something he was not used to. And she was a bit of a wiseacre. But in the years we were apart, Ellen changed completely and became what I thought of at the time as a goody-goody, dressing very modestly (in the early 70s!), carrying a tiny mom-style purse on her forearm. But did this happen because of the cancer? I have her senior picture still, taken before she got sick. In it, she’s beautiful, her long brown hair thick and wavy, her eyes sparkling.

Best friends take on the world!

The next best friend that shows up in Scrap is Randi. We are still friends although we live in different states. Randi and I were in all our classes together all through junior high because our school was “tracked” and there was only one class of our track. Randi and I became inseparable and pulled off some pretty weird capers, even after I had moved to a different high school, such as secretly driving 150 miles away to see a boy I had a crush on who had moved. If my parents had known!!! But they didn’t. Randi was always there for any silliness I could concoct and always had my back. I couldn’t have gotten through those years without her.

All of my female friends have been important to my development as a person and also as a writer. They have been a saving grace of my life.

This leads me to this: I had a LOT of help writing this book. Any book that takes 18 years to come to fruition has either sat there doing nothing most of the time or has been kicked around and around and around. Scrap is the latter. So many people–friends and strangers–have had a hand in Scrap that when I thought of writing a thank you to go in the book, I had one panic attack after another. What if I forgot someone at the time I was writing it? After all, memories come to us in fits and starts. They don’t rest at the front of our minds all the time. Not enough room!

Finally, I decided to skip the public thank you because it was too overwhelming. But if you helped me with this book don’t think for one moment that I don’t think of you often and of the help you gave me.

And thank you if you read it recently or are reading it now. You can’t imagine how much it means to me to share this story that’s been brewing for many decades!!!

PURCHASE SCRAP: SALVAGING A FAMILY

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A few recent links:

My guest post about the process of writing Scrap at True Book Addict

True Book Addict

A review of Scrap and several excerpts from the book at Storyteller Poetry Review

Storyteller Poetry Review

A new ekphrastic microstory at The Hoolet’s Nook (nothing to do with Scrap)

The Umbrella at The Hoolet’s Nook

This link is the photograph that inspired the story.

THE UMBRELLA PHOTOGRAPH

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Tour Schedule for Scrap: Salvaging a Family (memoir in flash):

March 21: Joy Neal Kidney (review)

March 23: Liz Gauffreau, (review)

March 24: Marie Ann Bailey, (review)

March 25: John W. Howell, (excerpt)

March 30: Miriam Hurdle, (companion story)

March 31: Review Tales (review)

April 2: the bookworm (review)

April 9: Ashley’s Books, Cozy Home Delight (review)

April 13: What’s That Book About (guest post)

April 15: Tabi Thoughts(review)

April 23: Lavender Orchids (review)

April 27: The Reading Bud (review)

May 4: Chelsea’s Books (review)

May 4: Smorgasbord (excerpt)

May 6: Brotman Blog (review)

May 7: The Reading Bud (interview)

May 14: True Book Addict (guest post)

May 15: Storyteller Poetry Review (review and excerpts)

May 19: True Book Addict (review)

May 21: The Book Connection (review)

May 26: Author Anthony Avina (review)

May 28: Author Anthony Avina (guest post)

Follow the tour with the hashtag #ScrapSalvagingFamily

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Tagged as #ScrapSalvagingFamily, best friends, book review, coming of age, ELJ Editions, Family, family history, flash memoir flash nonfiction, friendship, hybrid memoir, Memoir, process of writing a memoir, Scrap: Salvaging a Family

by Luanne | May 12, 2026 · 2:45 pm

Memoir Finalist!

Just a quick update post.

YAY!!!

Sorry if I split your eardrums ;). Scrap: Salvaging a Family is a Finalist in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards.

I think it’s very interesting that another of the memoir finalists is Deborah Sosin’s book Escape Velocity. She wrote it in 70 70-word memoir pieces. So that makes two finalist books that were heavily influenced by flash/micro writing. It would be interesting to look at memoirs from previous years and see if flash or micro popped up in that field. I kind of doubt there was much.

Just ordered Deborah’s book!

Remember that if you want to order an ebook of Scrap, it needs to be through the publisher, not Amazon. You can get a paperback either place.

SCRAP: SALVAGING A FAMILY AT ELJ EDITIONS

If you’re up for an interview of me, there is one at The Reading Bud.

LUANNE CASTLE INTERVIEW AT THE READING BUD

closeup of a blue retro typewriter and the word memoir written with it in a yellowish foil

Back to Michigan

I’ve been back home for a week after visiting my mother in Michigan. The trip was short and rushed as there was so much I needed to do for my mother. And relatives to visit, as well. I had no time for visiting friends, sadly.

In January my mother moved into memory care from the independent living apartment she had on the campus of her retirement community. She was hallucinating small animals in her apartment and having difficulty with time.

I kid you not that the minute she moved into memory care, the hallucinations stopped and she began to wonder, “Why does everybody in here have mental issues?”

A few weeks after she moved in I got a call from the director of assisted living (which includes memory care as well as regular assisted living) who said, “Your mother doesn’t belong in memory care. She knows who everyone is.”

And THAT is what I had been telling the staff at the community from the beginning of this whole hallucination period: “If she needs memory care why does she still know everyone–new people and family and old friends–and everything about them?”

They moved her into regular assisted living, and after visiting her I can tell you that is where she needs to be right now. She still relates well to people but continues to have some troubles with schedules and also cannot seem to organize herself.

As an aside: I have reason to believe that she might have had an undiagnosed UTI that did not show up on regular tests–and that most likely caused the hallucinations.

The gardener and I spent a great deal of time helping Mom organize her tiny apartment. We took her to buy a “petite” lift chair and found a gorgeous cherrywood (light finish) end table made by Amish craftspeople that was half price. I decided where all her pictures should be hung and put push pins in the proper places. The staff wouldn’t allow us to hang them ourselves.

One of the pictures is an 11×14 canvas painted by my two-year-old grandson for her. Mom and I Facetimed with little Hudson and his dad, too.

And when I talked to Mom the other day she said she points out Hudson’s painting to everyone who comes in to her room.

43 Comments

Filed under #bloggingcommunity, Art and Music, Family, travel

Tagged as assisted living, Family, great-grandmother, mother, toddler art

by Luanne | May 6, 2026 · 6:19 am

Genealogy Sort Of in Scrap

My friend Amy at Brotman Blog who writes engaging and well-researched historical novels has written a fabulous review of Scrap: Salvaging a Family. While you’re over at her blog, check out her in-depth, thorough, and fascinating blog posts constructed through her genealogical research.

Here is an excerpt of Amy’s 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.

The link can be found here:

AMY’S BROTMAN BLOG

Amy and I met many years ago on WordPress through her Brotman Blog and my family history blog, The Family Kalamazoo. At the time I began that blog, I had already been doing a lot of genealogical research on my mother’s family. It was fun because my grandfather had given me a large collection of old family photos and also because Dutch records are possibly the easiest ones in the world to research.

It was not at all so easy to research my father’s family. I had no information about my father’s father until Dad finally told me where I could find his name and profession (this is all in Scrap and a lot more interesting haha). Then I could really start to research in earnest. I describe what I know in my memoir. I ended up taking a DNA test to try to match family of my father’s father. Read the book 😉 to see how that went.

My paternal grandfather is well represented in Scrap as a thread of the book really is my “search” for the man. Before he passed away, my father’s twin, my Uncle Frank, gave me a photo of their father that I had never known existed. This image has been colorized by an artist and shows me why my hair began to turn gray when I was 26 . . . .