I’ve been looking forward to Luanne’s memoir for a long time. I was lucky to read early drafts of her memoir-in-progress twice, each time developing a deeper understanding of her complicated-uncomplicated* family life as well as a deeper appreciation of her mastery with words.

From the back cover, the reader is told that:

Scrap: Salvaging a Family is a hybrid flash memoir tracing the long shadow of childhood fear and the complexities of forgiving a dying parent. As a daughter uncovers her father’s painful origins, she begins to understand the man behind the anger–and reclaims pieces of herself in the process.

When Scrap first arrived in my mailbox and I (literally) tore open the packaging, I was struck by the beauty of the cover. While my main textile interest has always been knitting, I’ve been fascinated by collage, the taking of bits of memorabilia, letters and pictures from magazines, perhaps scraps of fabric, and affixing them in such a way that they tell a story. [Interestingly, my most vivid memory of making collage was in a support group I was co-facilitating for survivors of domestic violence. The collages made by that group were illuminating and empowering.]

Then there’s the format of Scrap, perhaps the most unusual format I’ve seen for a memoir. Luanne opens with three definitions of the word bastard and explains how each definition fits to Rudy, her father. It’s a tender but clear-eyed introduction to Rudy. With one definition:

For my father, born in 1928, bastard, a jagged blade, ripped his heart.

Yet, with another:

In my father’s case, it [bastard] meant he could be a genuine and legitimate dick.

Scrap is organized into parts, and each “chapter” within each part begins with the first several words in bold. Rarely does a chapter (or scene or section or whatever you want to call it) go longer than a page. Each flash in this memoir could stand on its own, and many of them have been published elsewhere. But you know the saying: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That’s Scrap.

*So what do I mean by “complicated-uncomplicated?” 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?

Of course, here, as usual, I’m thinking of my own complicated-uncomplicated childhood and family life where the key character is my mother. While she didn’t have wolf teeth, she had an icy sternness. Frost hung in the air when she gave me the silent treatment. That’s how I remember her as a child. My writing about her–although not in memoir as much as fiction–has made her less complicated and, thus, more human.

But I digress …

Like many memoirs, Scrap entices me to consider how I would write about my own life. The form that Luanne has chosen makes so much sense. It validates memory as a crazy quilt of remembrances. It allows us to imagine the voice and actions of our parents before we knew them. It brings together the bits and bobs of our lives, and lets them be what they are.

Very early in Scraps, when describing a memory of herself as very little, Luanne writes:

I will always be a creature of senses in that image. But I’m a big girl now, ready for school and full of narratives that dismantle themselves and intermingle their puzzle pieces so you can’t put the stories together with sense.

Oh, but these narratives and puzzle pieces do make sense, together and apart. With this hybrid of flashes, we as readers develop a more nuanced sense of Luanne’s childhood and her father than we would have through a traditional linear narrative. As writers, we are being shown another, perhaps more effective, way to tell our own stories.

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Scrap: Salvaging a Family is available through ELJ Editions and Amazon. Luanne also publishes on WordPress at https://writersite.org and Substack at https://luannecastle.substack.com.

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Luanne Castle’s story, “Garden Seasons,” was selected for Best Microfiction 2026. Her 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, andGinosko. She has published four award-winning poetry collections.  Her ekphrastic flash and poetry collection Hunting the Cosmos is forthcoming from Shanti Arts in fall 2026. Her mixed-media art has been showcased at Rogue Agent, Ink in Thirds, Watershed Review, Wildscape, Mad Swirl, Raw Lit, and Thimble. 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 cats in Arizona along a wash that wildlife use as a thoroughfare.

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Thank you for reading! Your reward is a two-fer, something we don’t see very often in our household: Wendy and Raji sleeping (more or less) on the same bench. [Note that Raji likes to stretch out while Wendy makes herself small by curling into ball.]