Book of the Week

 Scrap: Salvaging a Family (ELJ Editions 2026) by Luanne Castle

 


Comments by Editor Sharon Waller Knutson

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.

Synopsis: Scrap: Salvaging a Family

Luanne Castle’s hybrid flash memoir 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. 
Praise from Luanne’s peers:

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

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

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.

 
Luanne as a baby with her father Rudy

Excerpts from the book:
Scrap
A scrappy boy fuses
himself a father out of wants
Out of the gritty street pavement
Out of throwing away the hurt
Out of fighting and scraping
punching cracks and potholes
Scrapyard salvage appeals to him
Each scrap reveals a system
Steel gears, bolts, and bushings
rake heads, trowels, posts
wire aluminum and copper, tin
everything, brass hinges, fittings
he rearranges and solders into
magical monstrosities 

My father was scraps of before
initials instead of names
his father before him scraps 
of place and name, the secret
middle name shared under 
its double-locked hiding place
What do I do with a sack of bits
his mother’s scissors left behind? 
Love’s been stitched into me 
by her threaded tongue 
By the snips and wisp
The junk or trash, recyclable
material, remnants, fragments
Puzzle pieces awaiting home

Below is a portion of a flash story introducing Luanne as a child and her father Rudy. 

At the bottom of the steps, you walk into a room without walls, merely a corner of the basement. Up high, one casement window looks out into a window well sprouting weeds and dead leaves. A man throws his efforts into the project. A little girl, face like a cup, watches his Superman arms crank the vise handle and tighten the grip. The girl is me, and the workbench, its surface scarred slick by hammer blows, belongs to the shoemaker’s elves that visit the man when I am asleep. He presides over the saw, aiming for the pencil line, sawdust falling away on each side as snow does from a plow. On the pegboard, pliers and screwdrivers line up by size like Goldilocks’ bears. I sit behind the man who is my father, the chilled concrete floor twanging my backside.

 
Luanne as a baby with her mother and father

This poem is about Luanne’s mother:

Mommy’s Keds bend almost in half.
The rubber soles jut out at the folds.
I feel a spit of jealousy at the smart blue label
at her heels. My mother kneels, facing the tub,
the can of Comet in one hand, a sponge in the other.
I can’t figure out why our bathtub needs scrubbing
several times a week. She might wear off
the shiny porcelain finish if she keeps this up.
Why don’t you go dust the living room?
I should have just kept walking fast past the door.
She likes me to dust, but she does the real cleaning
herself. It has to be done very well.

The book is divided in three sections. The first section is a coming-of-age story, told in flash and poetry. It shows Rudy’s anger, Luanne’s anxiety, Rudy’s hard-working single mother, and the missing piece that must not be spoken of—where is Rudy’s father? 

I wonder why I’ve never heard of Dad’s father. My mind is still inside the book when my father stops by to see if I’m ready for ballet. “You ready to go?”
“Dad, where’s your father?” 
My father’s face colors a dangerous red. Although he’s a small man, he fills my open doorway. He’s in HELL! The exclamation point seals off my question. Zip. Period. End of subject.

The middle section is a disembodied therapy section. The third section is in later years, when Rudy finally tells Luanne about his father and the two begin to reshape their relationship. Throughout the first and third sections are brief reflective pieces that “interrogate” Luanne’s memories. The middle section is also reflective and sheds light on the workings of Luanne’s mind about the events of her relationship with her father. Scattered throughout the book are imaginings of periods in Rudy’s life. In the middle therapy section he tells one of his Korean War stories. It foreshadows his loving grandparenting of Luanne’s adopted Korean children.

I might as well have eyes on the back of my head and in my ears because I feel theirs on me all the time. Whether I’m weeding or nailing framework, they are close by, watching. Who knows what they are thinking. Some of them are missing fathers. They’ve either been killed or will be. The kids are supposed to stay outside the wire, but they are so skinny and malleable that they slide in. Yesterday, Jake tossed a few Hot Tamales into his mouth, then had the decency to look embarrassed when he saw their eyes and mouths open wide as if they could taste the candy.

We finally got our guns, so sometimes I’m on guard duty and get to return some of the attention. There’s one girl, maybe 11 or 12, who I see bossing the little ones when they get too near where we’re working. She’ll be pretty one day, but right now I only know she’s a girl by her ragged dress. I’ve noticed her sneaking cabbage rinds out of the trash. Of course, I pretended I didn’t see. Sometimes she gives me a smart mouth though I must imagine what she’s saying. Maybe it’s “go home, American.” She might imagine that we’re the reason they don’t have enough food. Every day I hope I get a package. But it hasn’t come yet.

Rudy is awaiting a package of candy from his mother for the children.

In the third section Luanne researches her father’s father, eventually finding a DNA connection with a relative and acts upon this match. As she puts the pieces together, Rudy falls seriously ill, and he and Luanne begin to talk every day. When Luanne visits her terminally ill father, he hands her a diamond ring from his finger just before she leaves for her plane. It belonged to her grandmother before her father had it made into a man’s ring. The diamond is flawed and is a metaphor for the relationship between Rudy’s parents. 

This is the diamond in the thick gold band that I carried home through the TSA line in the pouch with dimes and nickels. You’re the only one that knows its story. On the plane trip home, I read that when a meteor strikes earth, diamonds form in an instant. Some foreign bodies contain trillions. And iron, fire, silicate. But this was an interruption so that I could sheath my emotions. 

The facets are cloudy with soap and my father’s sweat. At the open jewel bath, I stop. I can’t make myself plunk it in. Should I wear you or throw you in the lake? Do you know the ways to obtain a diamond? 24/7 open pit, marine, and coastal mining year-round, year upon year. But there are other ways, too. Both legitimate and illegitimate. Ask my grandmother, if you know what I mean. Nobody else wants this shitty diamond that looks hacked in two with a silver blade.  

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. 

Scrap: Salvaging a Family (ELJ Editions 2026) is available on the ELJ Editions website as well as Amazon.

To buy the book contact Luanne Castle at luanne.castle@gmail.com