Guest Blogger and Author Luanne Castle!

How did prose, namely flash nonfiction, end up in my new poetry chapbook Kin Types?

The easiest way to think of flash nonfiction is to think about a creative essay and imagine it tiny—50, 100, 500, 1000 words.

Once I started trying my hand at flash nonfiction, I saw that flash nonfiction forms are just poems opened up a bit—made a little larger, a little looser, but also relying heavily on sound, diction, images, just as poetry does.

The forms include, but are not limited to:

*lyric essay

*collage

*prose poems

*braided essay

*hermit crab essays that assume the form of something else

*based on photograph, artifact, document

*lists

I was able to work my subject in both poetry and flash nonfiction simultaneously because the two genres occupy the same sort of creative process.

Here is a flash nonfiction piece originally published on Toasted Cheese that found its way into Kin Types.

  And So It Goes

While my subject was moderately serious—exploring the lives of my ancestors—a humorous  collection of poetry and flash nonfiction would be fun, too. Hint to our host, Phil Taylor . . . .

The written form that comes closest to a collection of poetry and flash nonfiction would be a haibun, which originated in the Japanese tradition. A haibun is a prose poem paired with a haiku. In fact, haibuns often contain humorous elements. For some new examples, read Contemporary Haibun Online.

Check out the reviews for Kin Types on Amazon if you want to find out more about the book. Find Kin Types on Amazon

Kin Types is a collection of lyric poetry, prose poetry, and flash prose that imaginatively retells the lives of private individuals from previous generations. Using family history research, the writer has reconstructed the stories of women and men from Michigan to Illinois to the Netherlands. Read together, the pieces create a history of women dealing with infant mortality, vanity, housewife skills, divorce, secret abortion, the artist versus mother dilemma, mysterious death, wife beating, and a brave heroine saving a family’s home.

Winner of the 2015 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award, Doll God, Luanne Castle’s first collection of poetry, was published by Aldrich Press. Luanne’s poetry and prose have appeared in Phoebe, Six Hens, Story Shack, The Antigonish Review, Crack the Spine, Grist, TAB, River Teeth, Lunch Ticket, The Review Review, and many other journals. Luanne’s 2017 chapbook Kin Types (Finishing Line Press), poetry and flash nonfiction, was a semi-finalist in the Concrete Wolf Chapbook Contest.

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 UCR (PhD); Western Michigan University (MFA); and the Stanford University writing certificate program. She taught college English for fifteen years. Her scholarly work has been published in academic journals, and she contributed to Twice-Told Children’s Tales: The Influence of Childhood Reading on Writers for Adults, edited by Betty Greenway. She divides her time between California and Arizona, where she shares land with a herd of javelina. Her heart belongs to her six cats and the homeless cats at the animal shelter where she volunteers.

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Have a great Tuesday everybody! ~Phil