Luanne Castle
Feel Better: Six Mixed Media Collages
Artist Statment: I created stained glass art years ago, but when my kids were small I stopped because I didn’t have a workshop, and glass cutting wasn’t safe around little feet and eyes. I put my creativity beyond writing into building puppet theatres and dioramas for my son and daughter. When I tried to go back to stained glass, I had lost the knack of tapping the glass to break it.
During the pandemic, I stumbled across YouTube videos about junk journaling and art journaling and fell in love with the process. I watched countless videos and read books and articles about mixed media and collaging arts. Collage, with its similarity to stained glass, really appealed to me. I started to make mixed media collages using the same themes I work with in my writing: gender, history, language, and the human body.
I write poetry, flash fiction, flash nonfiction, and essays. My collagey “hybrid flash memoir,” Scrap: Salvaging a Family, is forthcoming from ELJ Editions in March 2026.
Admire the Gleam
Fabrication of History
Fakery
Feel Better
Job Opening
Measurement of Lies
Luanne Castle’s art appears in Thimble, Raw Lit, Wildscape, Watershed Review, Rogue Agent, Ink in Thirds (where it was featured online), and Best of Mad Swirl, and has been nominated for Best of the Net. She has published four award-winning poetry collections. Luanne lives with four cats in Arizona along a wash used by wildlife as a thoroughfare.