If you read Scenic Writer’s Shack you know the site just sponsored a writing contest.
I’m THA-RILLED to report that my story won first place!
The contest rules included writing about a refrigerator delivery. What a fun assignment.
Photo by Vika Kirillova on Pexels.com
Filed under #AmWriting, #writingcommunity, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Microfiction, Writing
This story was so difficult to write. I agonized over it, rewriting it again and again. Here is the finished project. It was inspired by a weather event in Kalamazoo, Michigan, on May 13, 1980. Hope you like this story! A huge thank you to Editor David Sexton and the wonderful journal WENSUM.
Filed under #AmWriting, #writingcommunity, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Microfiction, Writing
You might figure that someone who revised the classic tale of Red Riding Hood in her chapbook Our Wolves might be interested in fairy tales. And I am!!! Today I have three fairy tales I’d like to share with you. The first two are new publications, and the third is personal.
This flash story, “The Floromancy of Identification,” in Panoply is in the folk tale style, but puts a new spin on things. The whole issue is wonderful, and I think you can skip around from this link to mine to other poems and stories.
The second is in the new issue of Last Stanza Poetry Journal and responds to the cover image, an illustration by Swedish artist john Bauer and in the tradition of troll literature. The idea of a changeling has long fascinated me. Definition from Oxford: “child believed to have been secretly substituted by fairies for the parents’ real child in infancy.” Trolls are also known for creating changelings by stealing human babies.
You should be able to click on the cover image below to get to Amazon.
Last Stanza Poetry Journal Issue #19: Fable
Now to the third fairy tale. The gardener and I are celebrating our FIFTIETH wedding anniversary this month. I know, wild, huh? And just like in fairy tales, we have had some real curveballs thrown at us by trolls, giants, and monsters (which are sometimes us).
But we prevailed, and here we are: fifty years out. It’s so hard to believe since I can remember all those early days so well.
The “kids” and baby grandson all took us out for a wonderful dinner and gave us a poster montage featuring the legendary (to our family) photo of the Holiday Inn where we had a dinner-dance reception (and even found some vintage postcards of the hotel). The marquee out front has our names on it. The kids love that photo, and my brother resends it to me every year!
Full disclosure: above photo is at the 42nd anniversary point . . . . But I kinda like it.
On Friday I picked up a navy gift bag of Kana’s cremains from the vet’s office. The ashes are in a little cedar box, and they came with a pawprint and two tiny vials of fur marked “Kana Castle.” I’m going to order a little brass plate for the box, just as I did for Tiger Queenie Princess Mimi, Felix, Pear Blossom, and Macavity. Of course, I took photos of everything, but I won’t trigger you by posting them! Everything is on the bookshelf altar of my late furbabies.
The wonderful Cleaver Magazine has published a flash story I wrote about being a medical student on “Grand Rounds” with a mentor/teacher doctor: Another Week Left of Grand Rounds with Dr. Webber
The flash editor Kathryn Kulpa worked with me on little revisions. She was very helpful. Her new chapbook was just released, and I ordered it, but it hasn’t arrived yet. Here is her book launch: For Every Tower, a Princess book launch You can hear little short readings from some of the other Cleaver faculty.
The baby goes to “school” part-time, and Grandpa and I have him part-time. He is very active, preferring to be crawling rather than sitting still, and standing rather than crawling, climbing rather than standing, and he can’t wait to walk on his own, which he can already do while holding my hands. He turned 8 months old Thursday. I set up 3 electric jack o’lanterns to get him used to Halloween! He LOVES his swim lessons. He even will float on his back with one hand under the back. And if I ask him if he likes school, he laughs a gleeful sound. He doesn’t say anything yet, but I am working on “grandma” being his first word. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
It’s been hard to write, between the baby, my painful legs (tendinitis all over), and lots of other life stuff going on, but I plan to take Kathy Fish’s Immersion tomorrow. It’s a 3 day writing party that is free if you are a paid subscriber to Kathy’s substack, which I am. The Art of Flash Fiction Sign up if you want to join me there Sunday, Monday, Tuesday!!!
I had some really exciting news recently. Some of you might know that I started writing a memoir about my father (my story, how it relates to him) in 2008. Some of you might be sick of hearing about this mythical project haha. It took many many shapes over the years, but I ended up with a hybrid form of memoir-in-flash called Scrap: Salvaging a Family. I wrote at least 400,000 words over the past sixteen years, although the final manuscript has about 10% of that amount.
My book is finally being published by ELJ Editions in 2026. So grateful to ELJ and editor Ariana D. Den Bleyker and to the many readers who have lent their skills to help shape this story. It really is worth it to just keep on keeping on, in case you needed to hear that today.
Coincidentally, yesterday the stunning journal Your Impossible Voice published a new flash story by me—thanks to Managing Editor Keith J. Powell—inspired by my father.
https://www.yourimpossiblevoice.com/when-you-were-still-too-young-for-school/
This story is a sort of introduction to my memoir.
###
I have had some publications I forgot to share here, including two collages by Raw Lit.
https://rawlit.weebly.com/5_5.html
https://rawlit.weebly.com/5_7.html
Curious or passionate about Flash Prose and Prose Poetry? Join us on zoom this Saturday, June 29 at 2PM Eastern time to hear some engaging and very brief stories. I’ll be reading two or three of my own. A big thanks to Meg Pokrass and Francine Witte for hosting these Prose Garden readings. Hope to see you there!
Here’s the zoom link:
Filed under #writerlife, #writerslife, #writingcommunity, Flash Fiction, Flash Nonfiction, Reading
It’s been hard to juggle baby care with everything else that I’ve had going on. That’s why I’ve been an on-and-off blogger lately. I have a lot of catching up to do on blog reading.
But I am happy that the baby is doing well. He’s now 4.5 months old and started to teethe. He actually started Thursday afternoon. He was cranky, which is unusual for him as he’s a very chill little soul. Mid-morning he chewed in his sleep. He drooled. Awake he put his hand in his mouth. His bib in his mouth. The burp cloth. His toys. His books. My clothes. Then he wouldn’t sleep, but just fussed. Finally the thought of teething hit me. So I soaked a baby washcloth in very cold water and put a corner of it in his mouth. Within a minute or so he fell asleep! That’s when I was 99.9% sure he was teething. Before he went home I felt his gums and sure enough on his top gum I found a little sharp point . . . .
I’ve been watching him for over three months now! Hope I can keep this up as he gets heavier. He weighs 15 1/2 pounds now. You might think that I would get stronger with the gradual increase of weight, but NO HAHA.
On another note, why do babies need such massive amounts of equipment and supplies?! The gardener keeps saying, that’s enough now, but it’s never enough because he keeps growing and developing.
Unfortunately, I introduced Hudson to the original Baby Shark song, and now I can’t get it out of my mind. EAR WORM. If I ask him if he’s Baby Shark, he laughs. If I say, “I’m Grandma Shark,” he laughs even harder.
I did participate in something this weekend that was not very time-consuming. That is the Flash Flood 2024 Write-In. Have you ever heard of Flash Flood? https://www.nationalflashfictionday.co.uk/index.php/flash-flood/ If you write flash stories you can submit early in the year (check website for dates) and then a weekend they publish them one at a time. That weekend was this past one this year.
Then they also have the write-in where they post a writing prompt every hour for 24 hours. https://thewrite-in.blogspot.com/ I decided to do that this year, although I couldn’t do all 24 as we had a big family party for the baby. I wrote ten stories and was pretty excited that they chose nine of ten to publish. Keep in mind, I spent about 15 minutes on each story, so they are really more like highly pressurized rough drafts. But I feel pretty good about how I did. Here they are:
https://thewrite-in.blogspot.com/2024/06/why-wind-laughs-by-luanne-castle.html
https://thewrite-in.blogspot.com/2024/06/the-princess-and-peanut-by-luann-castle.html
https://thewrite-in.blogspot.com/2024/06/elemental-ghosting-by-luanne-castle.html
https://thewrite-in.blogspot.com/2024/06/list-for-involved-grandparenting-by.html
https://thewrite-in.blogspot.com/2024/06/grounding-by-luanne-castle.html
https://thewrite-in.blogspot.com/2024/06/a-is-for-accolade-by-luanne-castle.html
https://thewrite-in.blogspot.com/2024/06/in-manner-of-fairy-tales-by-luanne.html
https://thewrite-in.blogspot.com/2024/06/i-am-whole-and-ubiquitous-by-luanne.html
https://thewrite-in.blogspot.com/2024/06/marianne-examines-physics-of-prolonged.html
Doesn’t it sound fun to participate? You should try it next time!
Just as I go to hit PUBLISH on this post, I feel the symptoms coming on of a bug that the Gardener has been wrestling with since Saturday night. Oh no.
Filed under #amreading, #AmWriting, #writerlife, #writingcommunity, Fairy Tales, Flash Fiction, Grandparenting, Writing
Wow, The Hemlock published two of my tiny stories–and I didn’t even know they were accepted. Great surprise today! A big thank you to the editors.
The link below will take you to the Summer Issue 2024 for downloading. My stories are on pages 35 and 36.
Here are the stories. The first one is very surreal, but I am very partial to its weirdness. The second one is much more realistic. Hope you enjoy them!
Filed under #AmWriting, #amwriting, #writingcommunity, Essay, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Microfiction
Brand new and familiar poems published today by Editor Sharon Knutson at Storyteller Poetry Review. This journal specializes in narrative poetry–in other words, poetry that tells stories. In this group are new poems about my father and our lake cottage and about driving home from my Chicago grandma’s apartment when I was young.
https://stortellerpoetryreview.blogspot.com/2024/05/storyteller-of-week_17.html
I really hope you enjoy these poems because as a whole they create a little memoir.
In other writing news, Our Wolves moved from the Eric Hoffer Grand Prize Short List to First Runner-up of Chapbooks. Um yay!!!!
This is what the Hoffer judges said about the book:
“Our Wolves, Luanne Castle, Alien Buddha Press – In this bold recasting of the Little Red Riding Hood tale, a traumatic adventure unfolds, and the expectations one has for reality are shattered. An air of mystery pervades each poem, but beneath that mystery, worlds of forced silences exist. Some poems shock. Some poems awe. Some remind readers that the wolves one should fear most are not those roaming the forests.These poems also explore the myths and legends, symbolisms and mysticisms, which comprise the folk tales with which so many are familiar, and breathe new life into these well-worn tales. This retelling forms a narrative for a modern age.”
Additionally, two of my flash stories have been long listed in two different contests. One of them didn’t move beyond and the other hasn’t been announced yet.
And in still further news. I sent a couple stories to a journal yesterday and they came bouncing back, a big fat rejection with the admonition not to send again for another five months. HAHAHAHAHAH.
I have not been able to get over to our blogging community much lately because . . . baby. However, I am working on my songwriting talents as well as new poetry. Here are some samples. The first is a song:
A big tummy is happiness.
A big tummy is happiness.
A big tummy is happiness.
And a little tummy is a big tragedy.
And here is a poem:
Those that are really cute
are the ones that toot.
Haha. It won’t be long before he can join me in singing. 3 1/2 months and he’s turning on his tummy and turning on his back already.
What a lovely surprise this morning. The fabulous EIC of MacQueen’s Quinterly, Clare MacQueen, has published three of my stories in the new journal issue. This is one of my favorite lit mags because Clare has a very eclectic taste, so the magazine offers so much variety, including funny stories and syllabic poetry.
Here are links to my stories:
Very micro humor story: http://www.macqueensquinterly.com/MacQ23/Castle-New-One.aspx
Surreal flash story: http://www.macqueensquinterly.com/MacQ23/Castle-Mountain-Painting.aspx
Creative nonfiction/memoir childhood story: http://www.macqueensquinterly.com/MacQ23/Castle-Haunted-Childhood.aspx
Filed under #AmWriting, #amwriting, #writingcommunity, Essay, Family history, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Flash Nonfiction, Memoir, Microfiction
