I wrote a guest post, “From Grimm to Golden Books: Writing Myself Out of the Fairy Tale,” for What’s That Book About–about the fairy tale influence on my new memoir Scrap: Salvaging a Family. 

You can read it here:

This week, Ashley at Cozy Home Delight reviewed Scrap: Salvaging a Family. 

[The book] brings up that complicated space where grief, resentment, anger, love, and even forgiveness all exist at the same time. The book does not try to simplify those feelings or resolve them neatly. It allows them to exist together, which felt very honest.

I thoug...

Happy National Poetry Month!

While I think of my new memoir Scrap as being hybrid (a mix of genres, such as flash, poetry, playscript, essay) with flash the predominant genre, I thought I’d look at references to poetry in the book.

I mention how much I loved Edna St. Vincent Millay poetry when I was young. This poem, which she wrote when she was ...

I just found a review of Scrap: Salvaging a Family from Jeyran Main. I love it!

Castle’s prose is spare yet evocative. The flash form intensifies the emotional resonance, allowing each vignette to stand alone while contributing to a cohesive emotional arc. Readers who appreciate memoirs that experiment with structure while remaining grounded in emotional truth...

Yvette Calleiro has come up with the topic for this week’s Tanka Tuesday: Fools Abound! Of course, she’s playing off April 1, April Fool’s Day, a day of sanctioned pranks.

Only I’ve never liked pranks. I don’t like to ...