I am pleased to introduce you to Luanne Castle’s latest book – Scrap Salvaging a Family. Luanne writes beautiful, award-winning poetry and has now taken the step to write a fascinating book about her family
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 own biological father’s identity from his daughter for decades. Can this family be salvaged?
Excerpt
This excerpt is from the first of three sections in Scrap: Salvaging a Family. I’ve enjoyed my father’s workshop in the basement of our house, but now the workshop is replaced by a sign of the Cold War.
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. My mother tells me we have grown a bomb shelter in our basement. She stocks it with bedding, Spam, and camping gear for three. She sets my fake Raggedy Ann doll on the blankets inside the footlocker and closes the lid on her. Daddy stores a baseball bat and a single-shot rifle and box of ammo in the room. I think those might be to defend our tiny room from outsiders. When I start my imagination train, a giant crab crawls aboard and into my tummy. The bomb I know about. It’s been on TV and the radio, people talking. But this place doesn’t feel like protection to me. Not like the forts I build with our bleached sheets. This shelter turns my stomach and tightens my chest.
What others say about Luanne’s book
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
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The vignettes in Castle’s Scrap are beautifully rendered. With house as vessel, we are voyeurs through her domesticity, the skilled lens of speaker Luanne’s traumas and perseverance as she navigates the rawness and fragility of youth. The book is both powerful and arresting–Castle is a deft miniaturist–each story etched with a fine blade, yet a delicate touch. Scrap is a collection of constellations of the ordinary. ~Robert Vaughan, Editor-in-Chief of Bending Genres, author of ASKEW.
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Luanne Castle’s Scrap is a memoir in flash. In flashes might be a more accurate term. This is a family story told in bursts of memory and image, puzzle pieces waiting to connect. It’s a young girl’s coming of age, navigating a path to womanhood out of hand-sewn dresses, gym class movies shown behind closed doors, stacks of moldering girlie magazines discovered at the dump. A girl living in the shadow of her father’s anger, violent and unpredictable as the tornadoes her family hides from. Behind the father’s anger, a missing piece. A hole where a father should be, a “space of unknowingness” both child and father must try to fill. This lyrical, beautifully imagistic work is both an exploration of the long roots of generational trauma and identity erasure and a vivid look back at growing up female in mid-century America. ~Kathryn Kulpa, author of A Map of Lost Places
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. Luanne has been a Fellow at the Center for Ideas and Society at the University of California, Riverside. She studied English and Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside (PhD); Western Michigan University (MFA); and Stanford University (Certificate). Luanne lives with her husband and four cats in Arizona along a wash that wildlife use as a thoroughfare.
Where to contact Luanne
