Luanne Castle: Poetry and Other Words (and cats!)

It took me eighteen years from the first story I wrote about my father’s workshop in our basement until publication for Scrap: Salvaging a Family. Some of that time was “down time,” including from the day ELJ Editions accepted the manuscript until it was actually published. So in the meantime I was writing other things, usually poetry, but some micro or flash fiction...

MasticadoresUSA, thanks to Editor Barbara Harris Leonhard, has published a new nonfiction flash that can be read tangentially to Scrap: Salvaging a Family. There are four end notes so as you read and find the little roman numerals they relate to the notes at the end, thus the title, “End Notes with Photograph.”

Melissa Lemay gave the #TankaTuesday prompt this week. She introduced a new form based on pi (3.14). The Pi-Ku is a tiny poem structured as 3 syllables, 1 syllable, 4 syllables.

Here are my thr...

Here’s a new post for my GRUMPY OLD WOMAN files. Yeah, you thought only old men were grumps a la Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon?

OK, I’ll be the grumpy woman so that I can feel as young as I can.

I saw a girl featured on local television for collecting and distributing gifts to others in need. I am not giving more details than that because I am not here to diss ...

I’m borrowing Auden’s title for his book-length poem that won the Pulitzer in 1948 because contemporary life is even more anxiety-provoking than in the 20th century. Maybe it’s because I’m living in the now, but it seems to me that all our technology has brought waves of anxiety into the lives of . . . well, of most of us.

In my own family most members deal with anxiet...