The Powell Legacy Series - New Introduction

 I've created an Introduction I am going to add to each of my Simon novels: Simon Says, Simple Simon, Simon's Mansion, and the one I am working on now. poebooks.net

Some stories are born from memory; others grow from imagination. The Simon Powell novels live somewhere in between. Simon’s journey begins in the shadow of my own—a young man searching for meaning, caught in the web of an all-encompassing belief system, and later grappling with the fallout of leaving it behind. His struggles with faith, identity, addiction, and reinvention are rooted in my experiences. Much of what Simon recounts about his time in the Unification Church, his work on Reverend Moon’s legal defense, and the eventual unraveling of his life in Los Angeles reflects my own history.

Like Simon, I was an insider—a believer who dedicated years to a movement that shaped me and then shattered me. Much of what Simon recounts about his time in the Unification Church and his work on Reverend Moon’s legal defense reflects my own history. To tell this story, I’ve drawn on my experiences while fictionalizing or reimagining many of the individuals and events to explore larger truths about identity, faith, and resilience. I lived through the tumult of that world, witnessed the public trial of Reverend Moon, and battled my own demons of addiction in the aftermath. These are not abstractions or borrowed details; they are pieces of my life, told through the lens of Simon’s voice.

But Simon’s story is also about something more personal: learning to accept the parts of ourselves we’ve been taught to suppress. For me, that meant grappling with my identity as a gay man, something I was conditioned to deny during my years in the church. The journey of self-acceptance has been neither simple nor direct, marked by unhealthy relationships and a struggle to understand what it means to love someone intimately—not just sexually. Simon’s relationship with Thad reflects that struggle. Thad embodies many of my loves and many of my failures to love, showing me through the writing what it takes to build a relationship based on trust, understanding, and mutual care.

Over the decades I’ve spent writing these novels, beginning to publish them in 2012, they have helped me explore and understand the themes I write about—not just as a storyteller, but as a human being. Through Simon’s story, I’ve gained clarity about my own, reaching a place of self-acceptance and maturity that has allowed me to live a fulfilled life with the man to whom I am now married.

At its heart, though, this series is about more than one person’s journey. The invention of Simon’s family in Sibley, Arkansas, the sprawling Powell mansion, and the secrets it protects serve as metaphors for the deeper truths we carry: the weight of legacy, the cost of lies, and the search for redemption. Through these fictional elements, Simon’s world becomes larger than my own, a canvas where themes of resilience, truth, and transformation come to life.

What I hope readers take away is not just a sense of what happened—whether in my life or Simon’s—but also an understanding of the power of fiction to illuminate our lives and explore what might have been in the face of different life decisions. By blending memory and invention, these novels explore the oppositions that shape us: truth and belief, destruction and renewal, the lies we live by and the truths that set us free.

Simon’s story is, in many ways, my own. But it is also more than that—a way to imagine the possibilities of rebuilding after loss, of finding meaning in the wreckage, and of daring to dream beyond what we think we know, of reimagining our lives.