Blog Archives
The Day We Forgot to Smile
The Day We Forgot to Smile by Anthony Owens is a linked collection of life-centered stories about childhood, family, grief, violence, love, endurance, and the small mercies that keep people from disappearing inside their pain. The book moves from Bushwick fire escapes, church shoes, radiators, bodegas, and bruised family rooms into adult stories of marriage, guilt, friendship, loss, and renewal. Its subtitle, “Stories from the Tender Corners of Life,” is apt: these pieces are interested less in spectacle than in the private weather of ordinary people trying to remain whole.
Owens writes with a strong sense of place; Bushwick isn’t merely a setting but a living instrument, rattling trains, hissing heat, sidewalk music, corner-store candy, and danger braided together until memory feels almost tactile. I found the early stories especially affecting because they understand childhood without making it soft. The boys on the fire escape are funny, watchful, hungry, frightened, and inventive all at once. That mixture gives the book its unique feel: sweetness is never allowed to stay simple, but bitterness is never allowed to have the final word.
My strongest reaction was to the way the book honors survival without polishing it into a slogan. Some stories are painful: domestic violence, grief, betrayal, loneliness, but the narration keeps searching for the human shape inside the wound. The prose leans into reflection. Owens has a gift for making humble objects feel charged with meaning: a radiator becomes a lullaby, a polished shoe becomes faith, a basil plant becomes grief learning to sit quietly in the room.
The target audience is readers of memoirs, literary short stories, inspirational fiction, family drama, coming-of-age, and resilience narratives, especially those drawn to books about ordinary people carrying extraordinary emotional burdens. Readers who appreciate the intimate, memory-soaked storytelling of James McBride or the hard-won tenderness of The Color Purple may find a similar moral warmth here, though Owens’s voice is more direct and testimonial. The Day We Forgot to Smile is a book about pain, yes, but more importantly, it’s about the stubborn human talent for finding a little light and naming it home.
Pages: 248 | ASIN : B0G4B4V9Z3
Becoming a Badass: From Fearful to Fierce
Becoming a Badass: From Fearful to Fierce is Margie Goldsmith’s memoir of clawing her way out of a childhood soaked in criticism, instability, illness, silence, and fear, then building a life on her own terms through writing, travel, love, divorce, reinvention, and sheer forward motion. The book begins in the “family garden,” where relatives are rendered as flowers, weeds, and strange blooms: Granny Elsa as a hydrangea, her mother as a thorned rose, her father as a yellow carnation, and Margie herself as a cobra lily growing in poor soil. From there, it moves through Paris, painful marriages, career stumbles, Outward Bound, friendships, illness, pancreatic and lung cancer, and finally a hard-won sense of peace that feels less like triumphalism than survival burnished into wisdom.
Goldsmith doesn’t polish people into saints or villains, which gives the memoir its bite. Her mother is cruel and disappointed, but also gifted, thwarted, and once capable of a startling clairvoyant flourish on a bus that leads to a dream apartment. Her father is affectionate enough to waltz with her on his shoes, yet terrifying, inappropriate, alcoholic, and eventually lost to suicide. That doubleness unsettled me in the best way. The emotional honesty has a raw, almost blunt-force quality, especially when she writes about wanting the wrong parent to have died, or about her sister Kathy’s mental illness, with a mixture of anger, pity, guilt, and grief. Those moments hurt because they don’t ask to be forgiven too quickly.
The writing has a conversational speed that suits the life being described: restless, funny, wounded, impatient with self-pity. Sometimes the prose is plain, and the story is quick. But that briskness is also part of Goldsmith’s personality on the page. She keeps moving because movement is how she survives. I loved the recurring garden metaphor because it gives shape to a family system that might otherwise feel unbearably chaotic. I also admired the book’s ideas about courage. It’s not presented as some glossy inspirational state. It’s selling a plane ticket at American Express and deciding to stay in Paris. It’s leaving a marriage because becoming “only his wife” feels like a kind of disappearance. It’s walking blocks after surgery, weak and furious and alive. It’s playing harmonica in public even when you’re not great, simply because joy has finally become more important than fear.
Becoming a Badass has pulse, nerve, and the weathered warmth of someone who has been through the worst rooms and still wants to tell you there’s a door. I’d recommend it to readers who like candid memoirs about difficult families, women reinventing themselves, late-life resilience, travel, writing, and the messy lifelong work of becoming less afraid. Its final gift is the feeling that fierceness doesn’t mean being unbreakable. It means breaking, healing crookedly, and still saying yes to the next strange, beautiful thing.
Pages: 233 | ASIN : B0FQ6S8NXC
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
Finding Home
The Diaries of a Teenage Pilgrim: The Early Journey is a coming-of-age memoir about finding your spiritual identity under pressure, when your family moves from rural Wisconsin to Israel. What do you remember most vividly about the moment you learned you were moving to Israel?
I already had a firm foundation in the faith before we moved. I was baptized at nine years old and had a charismatic experience of speaking in the “tongues of Canaan” at that age as well. Being a pastor’s kid was not always simple, and there were seasons of struggling on a tight budget where I could not always afford what my peers had. During my tweens, my heart was not as close to the Lord as it once was, but in my thirteenth year, I experienced a spiritual revival and a growing sense that He was preparing me for a great adventure with Him.
In some ways, the move did make my faith more fragile, but that fragility drew me closer to God. Fragility can do one of two things: it can ruin you, or it can cause you to lean on the Good Shepherd. I chose the latter, and it was in that leaning that my love for bridal poetry was born.
Readers who want to follow that thread further will find it woven throughout my next memoir. There, I hope to continue the journey, sharing my experiences in the Israeli-Lebanese borderlands. The story builds toward the Israeli withdrawal from the buffer zone in 2000, when my father’s work in South Lebanon was brought to a close. The story does not end there. The series is intended to continue well into my adult years, as there is much more of the journey still to share.
How did moving across cultures affect your understanding of faith? Did your beliefs feel stronger, more fragile, or simply different during that time?
When I was thirteen, and my parents said, “We’re going home” to Israel, I thought, but I am already home. However, home for me was Spooner, Wisconsin: the smell of pancakes with real maple syrup, mom’s piano filling the rooms, Dad home and not deployed, and hours of rollerskating on a Friday night. That was my definition of home, but it would keep changing.
Then the whole story flipped. I would spend years as a Third Culture Kid searching for home, crossing oceans, borders, and the wreckage of my own expectations.
A romantasy reader knows this, even if she has never opened a Bible. She knows what it is to be hunted by a love that will not be reasoned out of finding you. She knows the moment the Beloved crosses every border and descends into every darkness, not because you were worthy, but because you were wanted. She has felt the shock of being seen by someone who walks straight past every wall you built and finds the thing you buried deepest. He found me a displaced teenager with fifteen moves under her skin, and He said, “You are not a stranger to me. You are lovely, and you are mine.” Now, suddenly, it did not matter where I was. He was where I was. Home was not a place I was trying to reach; rather, Home was the One who had already reached me.
One day, I will go home to Him: into that final consummation that Revelation calls a wedding. However, in the meantime, in the liminal wilderness years, His Holy Spirit had already taken up residence in me.
He did not call me “stranger.” He called me “lovely.”
Yes, home can be a place. But at its deepest, truest, most unshakeable sense, home is a Person who chose you before you knew His name, who crossed every wilderness, who makes displacement holy ground and wandering a romance.
Here is what I know now that I did not know at thirteen, about to embark on a lifelong pursuit of finding home. He did not just come to bring me home. He placed the road inside me.
There is a song by Petra that resounds in my head:
There is a road inside of you, inside of me, there is one too — no stumbling pilgrim in the dark, the road to Zion’s in your heart.
If you could speak to your teenage self, what would you tell her?
Writing this book was itself a way of speaking to her. Going through my journals, I awakened memories I had long since forgotten, some of them buried for good reason. One that surfaced was a fight scene involving the entire boys’ hockey team, a memory I had blocked out for years. Writing it was harder for me than even the car accident scene, because embedded in it was a deep shame I had carried silently. Shame in the lies that had been spoken about me, and shame in having fought back, because I believed we were called to be peacemakers.
However, writing as a pilgrimage changes you. It makes you look again at what really happened. As I sat with that scene, I started to view it differently. It was the turning point of the whole journey. That was the moment I stopped looking for an earthly hero to save me and began leaning on my Heavenly One. God saw me in that very moment. He knew my name. He was not leaving me to walk alone as a stranger in a strange land.
So what would I tell her? I would tell her not to be ashamed of who she was and not to carry false guilt. I would tell her to be brave, to believe, and not to be afraid of becoming what her Beloved Heavenly King had destined her to be.
Author Links: GoodReads | The Diaries of a Teenage Pilgrim | Facebook | Website | Amazon
Lydia takes you on a journey to Jerusalem, living in a Jewish neighborhood, attending an Arab school in East Jerusalem, then moving to the Israeli-Lebanese border. She joins a hockey team and a speed skating team. Rockets fly overhead while her father works in South Lebanon with Christian radio. As the only believer in Jesus among her friends, she grapples with how to live set apart for God. But as tensions build, she runs away to the Ozarks to live with her Grandma and experience a normal American high school life. During that time, she comes face to face with her dreams and the deeper calling placed on her life. She has a destiny set before her, but will she choose the comfort of familiar ground, or will she return to the Galilean Hills where Someone was waiting for her?
This is the raw testimony of a girl and how she began to see how heaven and hell fought over her. As one who has moved between many places, she discovers a single constant: the mystical presence of God. He opens to her the language of the Song of Songs and reveals that He wants her for a Bride, drawing her into deeper intimacy through poetry and Divine love. This is the true story of a teenager who begins her journey and slowly finds the Lover of her soul. This is the early journey. Part two is coming, as the mountains of spices await Lydia’s return.
Lydia wrote in her diary as a teenager. She wrote this book as an adult who never forgot what it cost. For readers thirteen and beyond. Her story and poetry speak to anyone who has ever felt like a stranger at any age: anyone walking this journey of life and searching for meaning and purpose, Third Culture Kids navigating between worlds, ministry families facing cross-cultural moves, men and women wrestling with questions of belonging, seniors who want to reignite their passion for God, and teens grappling with confusion about identity and vision.
Between the Holy Land and the Ozarks, one reluctant pilgrim discovers you cannot outrun a love written before there was time.
My Search For The God of the Big Book (Hadassahʼs Story)
My Search for the God of the Big Book is part memoir, part spiritual argument, and part ministry manual. Hadassah Roach begins in childhood chaos, moves through alcoholism, AA, and her immersion in Reiki, then builds toward a hard-won conversion experience in which sobriety, for her, is no longer the end of the story but the threshold to Christian salvation. Along the way, she revisits the language of the Big Book, argues that its real destination is the God of the Bible, and closes with a devotional and a twelve-week study guide that turns her testimony into a framework for others in recovery. The result is a book that moves from private wreckage to public mission with absolute conviction.
What stayed with me most was the nakedness of the personal narrative. The early pages have real hurt in them. Her descriptions of growing up in fear, of becoming a mother while still feeling half-feral herself, of trying to care for Kevin through his disabilities while her own inner life was collapsing, carry a bruised immediacy that doesn’t need polishing. The scenes that linger are intimate and oddly quiet: her mother teaching her Reiki hand positions as a form of closeness, the bleak humiliation of being years sober and still wanting to vanish, the small human absurdity of pizza plans turning into a rainy doorway conversation that changes two lives. In those moments, the book feels most alive to me, because the prose becomes less declarative and more inhabited. She is trying to tell the truth as she has come to see it, and that gives the book emotional force.
The author’s central claim, that AA has drifted from explicitly Christian roots and that the steps are incomplete without Jesus, is stated with certainty. At times, I found that bracing, even moving. Her distinction between being sober and being free has real moral and existential weight, especially because she has earned the right to make it through lived anguish. The testimonial sections and study-guide material deepen her sense of mission, but they also shift the book away from literature and toward witness. I admired the book’s fervor more consistently than I admired its subtlety.
I found this book affecting, earnest, and at times surprisingly tender. I don’t think its power comes from stylistic refinement so much as from the intensity of a life reinterpreted through faith, grief, and service. When Roach writes about cutting the rope of bitterness with her father, about the ache that remained after years of outwardly successful recovery, or about building “a place for the unfinished,” I felt the book opening into something larger than argument, something wounded and generous at once. I’d recommend it most strongly to readers in recovery, especially Christians or spiritually restless AA readers who feel unconvinced that sobriety alone has answered the deepest question in them.
Pages: 175 | ASIN : B0GHZM5PDW
Finding Our Voice: A Story of Leadership in Crisis and the American Spirit Abroad
Finding Our Voice is part memoir, part leadership manifesto, part archive of speeches delivered while Adam Castillo led AMCHAM Myanmar through coup, sanctions, economic collapse, and disaster. What gives it shape is his “Three Acts of Leadership” model, moving from proving competence, to enduring pressure, to offering people a reason to believe, but what gives it pulse is the lived texture around that framework: the ex-Marine who washes up in Myanmar half-broken, builds a company from a couch he still keeps, stays when others evacuate, and tries to turn a frightened business community into something like a moral community. The book’s range is wider than its premise suggests. It moves from Marine Corps formation and post-service disillusionment to chamber politics, hotel ballroom speeches, a refugee’s testimony, and earthquake relief work, always circling the same core conviction that jobs, dignity, and belief matter most when history gets ugly.
What I admired most is that Castillo writes with the urgency of someone who feels he has earned the right to be emphatic. The book has a driving, spoken quality. You can hear the podium in it. But even when it swells toward rhetoric, it rarely feels bloodless. I kept thinking about the small, disarming details that save it from abstraction: that battered couch doubling as bed, desk, and command post, the local hires he treats not as placeholders but as future leaders, the image of him in the black Ford Ranger navigating Yangon during the coup, and later the surreal electricity of a July Fourth event where children wave little American flags, “Wild Thing” blasts, and the room tilts from ceremony into something like collective release. Those moments give the book warmth and grain. They make the ideas legible because they show what belief looked like on the ground.
I also found the book more interesting and more affecting when it let its certainty crack a little. Castillo is plainly a man of strong opinions, especially about sanctions, American power, the failures of institutions, and the obligations of leadership. At times, that forcefulness veers into self-mythologizing, and there are stretches where the prose presses so hard on its own importance that I wanted more room for complexity. Still, the book earns much of its moral intensity.
The inclusion of the Burmese refugee’s testimony deepens the narrative by shifting the lens away from Castillo’s own heroism and toward the human consequences of policy and abandonment. Likewise, the later sections on the earthquake and the Rebuild Fund, with their focus on water points, latrines, health workers, blocked transfers, and practical relief, pull the book back from grand theory into the stubborn world of actual need. I didn’t agree with every conclusion, but I never felt the ideas were merely posed. They’ve been lived in, argued through, and paid for.
I found Finding Our Voice uneven in the way many deeply personal books are, but never inert, never timid, and often genuinely stirring. Its best passages carry real heat, and its best insight is a simple one: leadership in crisis is less about charisma than stamina, witness, and the ability to make people feel they still count. I’d recommend it to readers interested in memoirs of service after military life, leadership under pressure, Myanmar, or the uneasy border where commerce, politics, and conscience meet. I finished it feeling that Castillo’s conviction gives the book its force.
Pages: 300 | ISBN : 978-1544551630
Clarity
In Writing in the Wound, you share with readers what it means to be shaped by academia, gendered power, and migration, and how your reliance on music proved to be a method of rescue. Why was this an important book for you to write?
I began writing Writing in the Wound at a moment of profound emotional and political intensity in my life. After years of navigating the Canadian immigration system, I found myself confronting not only institutional barriers but also the deeper psychological and embodied impact of living within them.
Initially, I considered writing a more overtly critical, policy-driven book—one that directly addressed the failures and frustrations of the immigration system. But I realized that such a project would take me away from my core as an artist.
What felt more urgent was to write from within my own lived experience—through sound, memory, and relationship. This book became a way of tracing how I endured, and what allowed me to stay. In that sense, it is not only a story of struggle, but of artistic becoming.
In its early drafts, the manuscript was expansive and uncontained. Over time, it found its center—particularly through my relationship with my mentor, which offered a space of care, listening, and growth. That relational grounding became essential to shaping the narrative.
Ultimately, this book created a new path for me—a path where I was no longer masking who I am or what I am enduring within this system. It allowed me to situate myself clearly as an artist, while also naming the conditions I was navigating.
I wrote this book not just to document what happened, but to understand how one continues to create, even within systems that constrain and wound.
Music appears as discipline, refuge, and language—when did it become central to your survival?
Music became central to my survival during the uncertainty of the COVID-19 period. After serving as Music Faculty for Semester at Sea, I travelled to Karachi due to the pandemic and found myself unexpectedly unable to return to Canada for nearly two years, at a time when institutions were largely closed and opportunities had disappeared.
In that period of precarity, when academic institutions had stopped hiring faculty, and it was difficult to teach remotely from where I was situated, music shifted from being a practice of expression to a practice of sustenance. Earlier compositions, like Anticipating and Living with Purpose, had received recognition on international charts and in competitions, which gave me the confidence to continue applying for opportunities. Then, Perils of Heavy Rainfall received Second Prize in Listening during COVID contest (2020).
Gradually, commissions and invitations followed, including from organizations such as New Music Edmonton and New Music Calgary, as well as from the International Women’s Day festival and the Canadian Music Week platform. What began as a fragile thread of continuity became, over time, a means of survival—both materially and emotionally.
Was there a moment when you felt your voice shifting—from survival to assertion?
Yes—there was a moment when everything I had been experiencing condensed into a single, clear sentence: that after 17 years in Canada, I still did not have permanent residency, and that this was not incidental, but tied to the structural limitations of the immigration system.
This clarity came to me in July, during a later stage of working on Writing in the Wound. By that point, the writing had begun to settle, and I was able to see my experience not only as something I had lived through but as something I could name with precision.
Being able to name that so directly marked a shift for me. Until then, much of my writing had been about processing and surviving. But that sentence became a position—it allowed me to see my experience not as an individual struggle, but as part of a broader systemic pattern.
Around that time, I also began to explore new pathways within the immigration system, including applying on humanitarian and compassionate grounds. That process required me to articulate my story not only as narrative, but as a formal claim—something that could be recognized within institutional frameworks. In that sense, my voice was no longer only expressive; it became strategic and assertive.
This shift was also reflected in how my work moved into public space. My writing on the undervaluation of artistic labour was published in Canadian Dimension, and I began sharing my story in community settings, including an event with Action Dignity. Speaking in those spaces—where these issues are often not centered—felt like an important act of bringing lived experience into public discourse.
That momentum continued with invitations to speak at larger gatherings, including a Labour Day event, where my story was witnessed by a wide network of community organizations.
In that sense, assertion was not a single moment, but a series of acts—each one moving my voice from private endurance toward public articulation and advocacy.
What is one thing you hope readers take away from Writing in the Wound?
At its heart, the book asks: what happens when our scars begin to speak?
I hope readers come away with a deeper recognition that the wound is not only personal, but structural. Experiences of migration, racialization, and institutional struggle are not simply endured—they also carry strength, insight, and endurance. They shape ways of seeing, feeling, and creating that are often overlooked or undervalued.
For those navigating migration and racialization, these experiences are frequently internalized, fragmented, or rendered invisible. This book is an attempt to give them form—to show that what is carried in the body and in memory can become voice.
If there is one thing I hope readers take away, it is that these experiences are not only sites of injury, but also sites of knowledge. When scars begin to speak, they do more than tell a story—they begin to name the structures that produced them, and in doing so, open the possibility of shifting those systems—and one’s positionality within them.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Website | Amazon
For Dr. Shumaila Hemani, music began as a calling. It unfolded into a life path through a rare human connection with eminent ethnomusicologist Professor Regula Burckhardt Qureshi, whose faith in her awakened the courage to risk everything for the artist’s path.
Spanning nearly two decades — from 2006 to the present — across the academic corridors of Harvard and the University of Alberta to the soundscapes of London, Boston, Chicago, Edmonton, Mumbai, Karachi, Calgary, Banff, and Toronto, and a world odyssey aboard a floating campus, Writing in the Wound is a story of resilience and fragile belonging, of visibility and erasure, and of the power of art — in particular Sufi music — to transmute pain into wisdom.
It is an intimate testament to truth and vulnerability in the face of institutional silencing, immigration precarity, and the long endurance toward permanent belonging.
Ripple Effect of Healing
In Mixtape, you share your experiences growing up as a mixed-race Black boy in Virginia, surviving abuse, battling confusion and loneliness, and overcoming the odds to find personal freedom. Why was this an important book for you to write?
You can’t move forward if you’re haunted by the past. Going back and exploring these stories (Sankofa) was necessary to my survival and healing. Furthermore, I believe our stories can have a ripple effect of healing when shared. I hope my story resonates with readers and makes them feel less alone. And as a father, I feel proud knowing my daughter will get to read this someday to see the work I did to create a better life for her than I had.
What role did music play in helping you process or remember different moments in your life?
I think musically. If I were filming the movie of my life, I’d be most concerned about the soundtrack. Music complements, drives, and speaks with and through my storytelling. Songs evoke memories and assure me I’ll never run out of things to write about.
How did your understanding of your parents and family change as you grew older?
I didn’t buy the lie that “We did the best we could.” They didn’t, and it shows. This is magnified by the reality that I’m a parent, and I’m successful at it by primarily doing the opposite of what my parents did. Parenting is a big responsibility. Our kids didn’t ask to be here. It is the parent’s job to be the best they can be so that their kids can thrive.
What conversations do you hope your book inspires in your readers?
I hope they recognize the need for reciprocity in relationships and that they leave feeling loved, liked, and/or understood.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
In Mixtape: A Memoir, therapist and storyteller Johnzelle Anderson weaves a raw, lyrical portrait of resilience, identity, and healing.
Born to a disengaged West African father and a volatile white mother, Anderson grows up mixed race in 1990s Roanoke, Virginia—feeling like an outsider in every room. Amid childhood abuse, neglect, and racism, he clings to the safety of his grandmother’s love and his inner voice’s promise of a better future.
Told in tracks rather than chapters, Mixtape charts Anderson’s journey from trauma to triumph—from being body-shamed and silenced to building a career in mental health and forming a family of his own. Along the way, he confronts the legacy of generational pain, redefines his sense of belonging, and takes a life-changing trip to Ghana in search of the roots his father never shared.
Honest, at times humorous, and unflinching in its vulnerability, Mixtape: A Memoir is a coming-of-age story for anyone unlearning and daring to rewrite the soundtrack of their life.
