Blog Archives
A Grand Façade: Stories of Truth and Fiction
James L. Peters’s A Grand Façade is a wide-ranging collection of personal essays, short stories, and an extended musical memoir. Peters brings the pieces together through a recurring interest in the fronts people build around their ambitions, fears, relationships, and failures. The nonfiction moves from childhood rebellion and family memories to cancer, grief, creativity, travel, and mortality, while the fiction gives those same concerns more symbolic and unsettling forms. The centerpiece is the lengthy title memoir, which follows Peters, his wife Melanie, and his friend Tim through years of writing, recording, performing, and trying to turn a deeply personal band into something sustainable. The book’s introduction openly frames the collection as an attempt to use both fact and invention to reach emotional truth, and that idea gives the varied material a clear center.
Peters is at his best when he’s examining his younger self with equal parts fondness, embarrassment, and honesty. Essays about stealing school silverware, giving a friend the cold shoulder over a teenage party, or misunderstanding his father’s disapproval are funny at first, then gradually reveal regret, compassion, or a changed perspective. That same self-scrutiny makes the musical memoir engaging even for readers who’ve never played in a band. It’s full of shabby studios, awkward gigs, creative breakthroughs, bruised egos, financial strain, and friendships tested by competing ideas of success. Peters doesn’t turn the adventure into a simple victory or cautionary tale. He treats it as a worthwhile, damaging, exhilarating choice that helped shape his marriage, career, art, and understanding of himself.
The short fiction broadens the collection’s emotional range. “Dirty Vowels” uses an overheard couple’s noisy sex life to expose the frustrations inside another marriage, while “Rabbits in the Mouths of Wolves” turns mysterious bags of garbage into a tense parable about status, fairness, and social conformity. “Twinkle” approaches cosmic catastrophe through an intimate human relationship, and “The Muse on Your Back” captures the loneliness, addiction, and manufactured persona surrounding a rising musician. Some of the older stories show their age through heavier exposition or symbolism, and the memoir’s extensive chronology occasionally slows the pace. Still, Peters’s directness and wry humor keep the book personable. He’s willing to be the fool, the wounded son, the difficult bandmate, and the frightened patient, which gives the collection warmth without sanding away its harsher edges.
I’d recommend A Grand Façade most strongly to readers who enjoy memoirs about ordinary Midwestern lives, creative ambition, aging, family, and the complicated afterlife of youthful dreams. Musicians and other artists who’ve spent years pursuing recognition will especially appreciate its account of the work, compromise, friendship, and stubborn hope behind an independent creative life. It’ll also suit readers who like collections that move between candid autobiography and speculative or literary fiction while returning to a shared set of questions. Peters’s central insight is persuasive: a failed dream can still produce a meaningful life, and looking honestly at the façade may reveal something more valuable than the success once imagined.
Snapshots With God
Snapshots With God, by William G. Joseph, is a compact, contemplative collection of short essays on Christianity, each one framed as a kind of theological snapshot: brief, personal, provisional, and meant to invite further thought rather than close the matter. Joseph moves across a wide field of subjects, including creation, prayer, conscience, evolution, original sin, scripture, sacraments, tradition, humanism, sexuality, aging, and the humanity of the Church. What unites the book is its persistent desire to rethink inherited religious language in light of lived experience, modern science, and a more relational understanding of God. Again and again, Joseph returns to the idea of God as Creator, not as a distant ruler dispensing rewards and punishments, but as the sustaining presence within creation, relationship, freedom, love, and human flourishing.
I appreciated this book’s willingness to disturb easy certainties without becoming cold or dismissive. Joseph writes as someone who has lived with these doctrines for a long time, not as an outsider throwing stones, and that gives even his sharper observations a pastoral warmth. I was especially drawn to the way he uses ordinary scenes to open into theological reflection: the noisy Walkman on the commuter train becomes a meditation on morality and social responsibility, while the books in Hay-on-Wye become a tender image for uncelebrated souls contributing quietly to the life of Christ on Earth. These moments are the book at its best, intimate and disarming, because Joseph doesn’t begin with abstraction. He begins with a train car, a shelf of secondhand books, ducks in spring, childhood memories of religious prejudice and segregation, then lets those details widen into questions of conscience, dignity, and grace.
The writing has a conversational looseness that suits the book’s purpose, though it also gives the collection an uneven texture. Some essays feel beautifully alive, with a sly humor and a seasoned intelligence at work, especially when Joseph punctures pious clichés about angels, prayer, or “God talk.” Other passages are more argumentative, even compressed. Still, I appreciated the honesty of that compression. The book doesn’t pretend to be a systematic theology, and its rougher edges can feel like part of its humanity. Its central ideas are bold: that creation deserves far more theological attention, that Jesus may be understood more as revealer than as a solution to a juridical problem of original sin, that conscience is less a hidden rulebook than an awareness of relationship, and that tradition must remain open to progress. I trusted the seriousness behind the ideas, and I often felt the pleasure of being asked to think again about words I’d heard too often to truly hear.
Snapshots With God left me with the sense of a thoughtful Christian mind still searching, still revising, still refusing to let faith harden into slogans. Its conclusion in old age is particularly moving, not because it offers certainty, but because it describes a mature comfort with mystery, a hope that has become less wishful than expectant. This is a reflective and sometimes challenging book, best suited for Christian readers, discussion groups, clergy, former clergy, and spiritually curious people who are willing to sit with questions about doctrine, science, evolution, and the future of faith without demanding tidy answers. I would recommend it to readers who value theological honesty over devotional sweetness, and who believe that faith, like the human spirit itself, should keep maturing.
Pages: 122 | ASIN : B0DZTWPBL2
Covert Christian Narcissism
The Jezebel Tracks is a searching and fiercely theological essay collection where you examine family abuse, covert Christian narcissism, addiction, spiritual warfare, and survival. What first convinced you that these essays needed to exist as a book rather than remain private reflections?
I think a couple of things are at play here.
1) People who grow up in the almost Truman Show-like dynamics of a family like mine come to understand that something is wrong, but often, they don’t know exactly what it is unless they seek help and begin a search for the reality behind the smokescreen. It is so frustrating and so strange, and when the picture becomes clear, the depth and darkness of the evil it reveals is transfixing. It can be simultaneously liberating and horrifying—it stops you in your tracks. I think a lot of people who are on this kind of search, especially if they come from a family like mine, might benefit from a boost up the research tree in their quest to make sense of the strangeness from which they come. I hope this book can help provide that kind of boost.
2) Getting all the way into the demonic, I believe the spirit of Jezebel likes to hide. This is a key aspect of the covertness of covert Christian narcissism. I believe this thing doesn’t want to be found out, and I am grateful to have the opportunity to expose it, at least insofar as my upbringing under the tacitly dominating authority of my maternal grandmother and the family dynamic she created is concerned. I think these essays needed to be published in book form to at least have the potential to reach people who come from a cocktail of darkness like the one in which I was raised, and let them know they are not alone, that these dynamics are documented phenomena, and to encourage them to keep going—to keep fighting to at least get on a path to breaking free. I feel very strongly about trying to reach these people. I think that is the primary reason I wrote this collection.
You describe abuse that often arrived through politeness, performance, or spiritual language rather than open violence. Why was it important to explore that quieter form of control?
Covert narcissism seems to me to be the most pernicious form of the disorder. The mannerliness, the performance, and the spiritual rhetoric that characterized the atmosphere my grandmother engendered were aspects of deceit. The concept of the wolf in sheep’s clothing is highlighted in several New Testament books. This quiet form of control is the wolf-in-sheep ’s-clothing dynamic. I think it is more evil than overt narcissism because its cornerstone is deception. This deception—what you see is the opposite of what you will get—echoes the same elemental aspect of evil presented in Genesis. The Nachash, the serpent-like entity in the account, is primarily a deceiver. The world my grandmother fabricated, orchestrated, and funded—an elaborate bal masqué—papered over the dark spiritual realities in the family, which, in addition to covering her motives, also helped obscure the true personalities and motives of some other family members. Again, at least for me, it was kind of like The Truman Show. My grandmother was so good at her act, and so consistent with it, that I bought it hook, line, and sinker in my naïve youth. Finally understanding the depth of that deception and the personality disorder ramifications of it shook me to my core. How can a person who looks so good be so evil? Well, my conclusion is that people who engage in this kind of deception may be some of the most evil there are.
The phrase “covert Christian narcissism” carries enormous weight in the book. How would you define it for readers unfamiliar with the concept?
This is a great and central question. Over the decades, through counseling and a lot of research, along with the support of a few truly prayerful friends, I came to understand pieces of the puzzle of my background—like my dad’s overt narcissism, but there was a lot more to dig up. It was like doing a big jigsaw puzzle over decades. If I recall correctly, I started watching Christian counselor and narcissism expert Kris Reece’s videos in July of 2024 when I was in Mexico. I had never heard of covert Christian narcissism, and, as she explained it, all the light bulbs lit up simultaneously. That was the last piece of the puzzle. Additionally, it was as if an electromagnetic force caused all the slightly out-of- place pieces to arrange themselves and fall into place—creating a clear and complete, if devastating, picture of my background. It was transfixing—truly stunning. At that point, I was ready to write, and I started the first piece in the collection that would become The Jezebel Tracks right then and there. Eleven months later, at the end of June 2025, the manuscript was complete. Covert Christian narcissism is covert narcissism with a thick veneer of Christianity shellacked around it as a disguise. A covert narcissist uses guilt and creates a sense of obligation in his or her targets, often presenting himself or herself as a perpetual victim or almost a martyr. They use this act to pull in empathetic people to provide them with the attention—the narcissistic supply—they need to feel important and substantial. Their inner worlds are so barren that, parasite-like, they need to get their validation from others’ attention and their dependence on them. They do not have the emotional and spiritual warm bloodedness of genuinely caring, empathetic people, but they need these people attending to them to feel viable as persons, to not feel hollow inside. I think of narcissists—both covert and overt—as emotionally and spiritually cold-blooded—essentially reptilian in nature, and devoid of the warmth of true human empathy, kindness, and, most importantly and devastatingly, love. Something I read many years ago put it succinctly. The author wrote, “The narcissist has made the terrible decision not to love.” A covert Christian narcissist’s doing this in the name of Christ while adopting a persona of performative holiness makes the decision all the more chilling and insidious.
Despite the darkness in the book, it ultimately argues against despair. Why was it important that the collection end in defiance rather than collapse?
There is defiance in the collection and particularly in the ending, but the most elemental sense is of having come through the storm of my life. It is kind of a deep exhalation that really required my whole life experience to that point to fully leave my psychological and spiritual respiratory system. I think the collection ends in release—the release from my depression and the release from not understanding the full picture of the darkness from which I come. I didn’t make the story do anything or happen a certain way. This is nonfiction. It actually happened. I didn’t rescue me. God did. And the first major assignment after the rescue was writing The Jezebel Tracks.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Website | Amazon
Did you grow up in a family of extreme narcissists and their enablers, or have you ever wondered what it’s like to live in that kind of fishbowl environment? If so, The Jezebel Tracks is for you.
Gardner Landry’s essays feature both overt and covert histrionic narcissists—at least one of whom likely qualifies as a psychopath—while also exploring the bizarre psychodynamics of his family. Along the way, he reflects on Houston and New Orleans, and the curious ways these cities relate to one another.
You’ll meet Landry’s dramatic, buffoonish father, his chillingly psychopathic side, and a maternal grandmother who is outwardly sweet yet privately manipulative—the queen bee of the family. Topsy-turvy gender roles, financial charades, and spiritual dimensions of abuse reveal themselves, as Landry examines what he believes to be the spiritual roots of these disorders, culminating in an unexpected journey toward redemption. Buckle up for the ride.
The Jezebel Tracks
The Jezebel Tracks is a searching and fiercely theological essay collection in which author Gardner Landry examines family abuse, covert Christian narcissism, addiction, spiritual warfare, and survival through the figures of his grandmother Mema and his father Fred. The book moves from cigarette smoke in a River Oaks bedroom to New Orleans streets, from Houston’s oil-soaked identity to John Kennedy Toole, from the wound of an “anti-father” to the author’s painful conviction that his life was bent by forces both psychological and demonic. At its center is a survivor’s attempt to name what nearly destroyed him, and to insist that evil was not, finally, his destination.
Mema’s Silva Thins and Virginia Slims become more than cigarettes; they become little instruments of poise, entitlement, concealment, and control. The image of her propped in bed, coolly observing that the author is “on a slow burn,” stayed with me because it has the chill of something both intimate and merciless. Landry’s prose can be ornate, even feverish, but at its best, that intensity feels earned. He writes like someone sorting through ash with his bare hands. The essays on Houston and New Orleans give the book needed oxygen, and I admired the way he can turn from family wreckage to civic portraiture, seeing Houston as blunt, masculine, commercial sunlight and New Orleans as lunar, seductive, Catholic, haunted, and alive with ritual.
Landry’s framework of the Jezebel spirit, witchcraft, generational iniquity, and demonic principalities will resonate deeply with some readers and unsettle or alienate others. The book isn’t merely trying to accuse; it’s trying to understand how charm, piety, money, family hierarchy, and fear can form a beautiful cage. The strongest idea here, to me, is that abuse often survives by dressing itself in respectable language. Whether in Mema’s prayer group, Fred’s sadism, the Vanderbilt law school rupture, or the long meditation on John Kennedy Toole, Landry keeps returning to the terrible cost of being trapped inside someone else’s story.
In the end, I came away moved by the book’s strange mixture of anguish, conviction, literary appetite, and hard-won defiance. It’s not a neutral book, but it has the pulse of lived experience and the moral urgency of testimony. I would recommend The Jezebel Tracks to readers interested in memoirs of family trauma, Christian spiritual reflection, narcissistic abuse, Southern place-writing, and essays that risk excess in pursuit of truth. It’s a dark, wounded, intensely personal book, but its final force is not despair; it’s the stubborn, luminous claim that a life can be damaged without being finally owned.
Pages: 281 | ASIN : B0GT21HVWH
Borders and Blessings
Borders and Blessings is a full collection of short stories, poems, and reflective essays that circle around one big idea: how fragile human life feels at the “borders” of countries, families, generations, and faith, and how much grace still hides there in everyday “blessings.” We move from a boy in Meerut who naïvely reports corruption to the Prime Minister, to the wry “Autobiography of a Punjabi Lungi,” to meditations on Sikh history, to a soldier’s split-second act of mercy, to intimate tributes to teachers, fathers, and grandchildren. The book reads like a life’s worth of experiences laid out in different forms, all pointing back to love, conscience, and quiet courage.
I enjoyed the writing most when it stayed simple and direct yet carried an emotional punch that arrived a few beats late. The language slides easily between English and Hindi or Urdu, and that blend feels natural, not forced. Stories like “Aum’s Awakening” and “Embers of Tenderness” kept me hooked because the sentences are clean, the scenes are clear, and the emotional stakes come through without too much decoration. The personified lungi is playful and cinematic, while pieces like “Letter to my Grandson” feel like someone speaking right across the table, with quotes from poets woven in like old friends. Overall, the voice stays warm, unpretentious, and very human. I never felt talked down to, which matters a lot to me in this kind of reflective writing.
The book leans into kindness, spiritual depth, and the value of everyday decency, and that worked for me more often than not. I liked how the same values show up in very different settings: a Hindi teacher who treats every child like her own, a soldier who chooses restraint at the border, a grandson being gently nudged toward nature and poetry, historical figures like Baba Buddha and Bhai Mardana framed not as distant saints but as living examples of service and humility. The through line is clear: power and noise fade, small acts of love do not. Some pieces resolve in a neat way that real life rarely offers, but the sincerity behind the work is so strong that I found myself accepting the idealism instead of resisting it. The book feels less like an argument and more like an invitation to soften, which I appreciated.
I would recommend Borders and Blessings to readers who enjoy heartfelt, spiritually tinged literature rooted in contemporary Indian life, and who do not mind moving between fiction, poetry, and memoir in one volume. If you are a teacher, a parent, someone interested in Sikh history, or simply a person who likes stories that affirm goodness without ignoring pain, this will speak to you. If you want a collection that sits with you quietly, stirs up old memories, and leaves you a little more tender than before, this book is a good fit.
Pages: 248 | ISBN : 9353535166
A Revolution of One
A Revolution of One gathers the poems, prose, fragments, and messages of James Munro Leaf into a raw and startling portrait of a mind fighting to stay open to beauty while battling its own darkness. The book moves through friendships, love affairs, political fire, theatre, travel, and long stays in psychiatric institutions. It circles again and again around one central idea. That art and courage might hold back despair for a moment, even if they cannot defeat it for good. The pieces feel found rather than polished, scattered like notes left on a desk after a long night. They come together into a kind of memoir told sideways. A life seen in shards.
The writing has this mix of clarity and frenzy that left me wide awake. Some lines felt soft and tender. I kept feeling pulled between admiration and sadness, almost like watching someone run full speed into a storm because they refuse to bow their head. Leaf’s honesty is so bare that I sometimes had to pause just to take a breath. He writes about love like it is a lighthouse. He writes about mental illness like it is a hunt he must survive. And he writes about ordinary people with such respect that even a stranger on the subway feels illuminated. His voice has a kind of youthful fire that doesn’t feel young at all. It feels ancient and worn at the edges.
I also found myself moved by his beliefs about art. He refuses to treat it as decoration. He wants it to matter. He wants it to change something inside a person. And I felt a kind of ache too. His desire for meaning often bumps up against a world that shrugs back. His political anger hits the page with a force that made me nod one moment and wince the next. His love poems feel fragile and wild at the same time. His pieces from psychiatric wards hit with an honesty that left me quiet for a while. Nothing here feels moderated or smoothed. It is all edge and pulse and longing.
A Revolution of One is messy in the way real lives are messy. It left me grateful. I think this collection will speak to readers who have struggled with mental illness, to artists who feel trapped between idealism and daily life, to anyone who has ever tried to hold onto hope while the world shakes under their feet. If you want something that feels alive, frightened, brave, and stubbornly human, then this book will be perfect for you.
Pages: 167 | ASIN : B0G8KJ7Q9F
Emotionally Open & Spiritually Attentive
Composed in Silk blends vivid portraits with short essays about stillness, grace, identity, and the long, slow work of becoming, taking readers on a reflective journey tracing the movement between silence and revelation. What were some ideas that were important for you to share in this book?
Composed in Silk is the second book in a five-book series titled The Life’s Theater: Art and Essays from Behind the Curtain, and it is dedicated to my wife. Each portrait in the book is highly stylized and created in my own distinctive painting style, with one exception. The final portrait is rendered in a realistic style using classical technique.
The portraits are small seconds of my wife’s presence. They are heartbeats of her silence, quiet, stillness, grace, identity, and the long, slow work of becoming. Although the figures do not physically resemble her, each image carries her mood, her rhythm, and a frozen moment that is unmistakably hers. What mattered most to me was capturing not likeness, but essence, allowing stillness to speak as loudly as form.
Can you share a bit about your writing process and how you selected the artwork that accompanies each writing?
Throughout my creative life as an artist and painter, I have followed Leonardo da Vinci’s view of art, which I believe remains timeless and deeply relevant today. For him, art arises from careful observation guided by intellect. He believed that true art is not the result of skilled hands alone, but of a thoughtful mind capable of understanding the complexity of nature and translating that understanding into expression. Studying nature was essential, not to imitate it mechanically, but to reveal the intentions and insights of the artist’s mind.
My process begins long before a painting is completed. I observe, study, create thumbnails and rough sketches, and work toward developing a unique style. During this time, I also take notes, sometimes just a few sentences, sometimes a paragraph, capturing my observations and emotional responses. Over time, these notes become part of the painting itself. They live within the work for years, shaping its meaning and presence, until they eventually find their way into a two- or three-hundred-word essay that accompanies the artwork. In this way, image and language grow from the same moment of attention and reflection.
Do you think there is a particular mindset or environment that a reader should be in to fully appreciate your work?
Composed in Silk, and the entire series The Life’s Theater: Art and Essays from Behind the Curtain, are not meant for everyone. They are for readers who are emotionally open and spiritually attentive, who appreciate an image on canvas not only as a painting, but as an emotional moment worth entering. The work invites readers to explore both the artist’s inner state and the subject’s emotional presence at a particular moment in time.
I do not expect the book or the images to resonate with a large audience, and I accept that some readers may connect with certain pieces while others may not connect at all. The work was created for me, from my heart and my emotions, and Composed in Silk was dedicated to my wife.
What will the next book in that series be about, and when will it be published?
The next book in the series is The Life’s Theater, Book Four: The Places That Carried Us. It is dedicated to my brother and explores memory, places, and the landscapes that shape who we become. The tentative publication date is the first half of March 2026.
The full chronology of the series is as follows:
- The Life’s Theater, Book One: Echoes That Suffocate, dedicated to my parents. Published and available on Amazon.
- The Life’s Theater, Book Two: Composed in Silk, dedicated to my wife. Published and available on Amazon.
- The Life’s Theater, Book Three: The Quiet Architecture of Love, dedicated to my sons. Just published and available on Amazon.
- The Life’s Theater, Book Four: The Places That Carried Us, dedicated to my brother. Tentative publication date: first half of March 2026.
- The Life’s Theater, Book Five: Geometry of Memory and Light. Dedication to be decided. Tentative publication date: summer 2026.
- The Life’s Theater: Art and Essays from Behind the Curtain, the complete edition. Tentative publication date: late 2026 or sometime in 2027.
Together, the series forms a single, continuous meditation on memory, love, and the emotional spaces we inhabit over a lifetime.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website
The figures within do not seek to be seen. They dwell in the strength of being known, in gestures that reveal the beauty of endurance and the courage of tenderness. Through them, love is not spectacle but continuity, an unfolding that survives without need for proof.
Blending visual art and lyrical prose, Composed in Silk invites the reader into a space where perception softens and truth breathes. It asks nothing but attention, offering instead a stillness that restores, and a grace that lingers long after the final page.
Meanwhile, here in Austin
Meanwhile, Here in Austin is a warm and vivid portrait of a life rebuilt in a new city, told through photographs, seasons, small moments, and quiet revelations. The book moves through a year in Austin and folds in memories of storms, wildlife, music, food, community, and family. Author Cetywa Powell shares snapshots that feel intimate and honest. Some pages linger on deer and wildflowers, others settle into the chaos of winter storms or the comfort of neighborhood rituals. The through line is a deep affection for a place that slowly becomes home.
I was pulled in by Powell’s writing style. It feels simple at first, almost gentle, yet underneath it sits a surprising emotional weight. Her images of deer in spring made me smile, and the chapters on thunderstorms made me sit up a little straighter. I felt her worry during Winter Storm Uri and her delight during summer afternoons at swimming holes. The voice feels like someone thinking out loud while watching the world drift by. I enjoyed that. It made the book feel personal. I wished the book had lingered longer on certain ideas, because some scenes flew by quickly, but maybe that fleeting quality is the whole point.
What stayed with me most was how the author tied her family’s everyday life to the bigger personality of Austin. The mix of humor, frustration, awe, and curiosity reminded me of what it feels like to fall into a city and let it shape you. Her thoughts on rising costs, constant change, and the churn of neighbors felt real. I felt her pride when she found slivers of beauty in chaos and her sadness when the bats did not appear one summer night. Some passages felt like private confessions. It is rare for a book of photography and short reflections to leave such a strong impression.
By the end, I felt like I had taken my own quiet tour of Austin, guided by someone who pays close attention to the world around her. I would recommend this book to readers who enjoy reflective writing, newcomers to Austin, longtime Austinites who want to see their city through fresh eyes, and anyone who loves stories built from ordinary days that somehow feel extraordinary. It is a heartfelt and thoughtful read, and a lovely companion for anyone who enjoys watching a place become home.
Pages: 100 | ISBN : 0998892378
