The Rabbit Hole of Cults and Patriarchy

Plus book challenge news, submitting to journals, big and small presses

Two FLDS women and a man, who appeared to me to be their husband, at Arches National Park in Utah.

I want to step away from the wild sorrow of the larger world today. This week I’ve been wondering—again—about a title for my upcoming novel. And since that novel is about a cult, I’ve been down the cult rabbit hole. Join me. 

Help me with the title

Here’s the info from which the back cover copy will come:

Patricia Warren is a fourteen-year old living in the “Community” with her father, four mothers, and sixteen siblings. The prophet, Uncle Timothy, controls all facets of life. He assigns young girls to marry far older men, with whom they will have numerous children. When he has a vision that Patricia will marry her nineteen-year-old cousin, she has no choice. 

Smart but poorly educated, Patricia at first submits to her fate. Observant, she realizes no one is happy: two of her moms love one another, but are not free to express this; another is pulling the family apart in her effort to get free. As Patricia better understands the prophet’s manipulation of community members, she joins forces with her twin brother, her older sister, and two good friends to free her family from the psychological and spiritual abuse of an evil man. 

I mentioned before that my working title was Keep Sweet, but I’ve abandoned that since Netflix has a series by that name about the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints and Warren Jeffs. Plus, while my fictional community is modeled on the FLDS, it is fiction and thus, not a direct correlation to that reality. I include other cultish behaviors and events. The characters are products of my imagination.

What do you think of these titles? I’m leaning toward Keep Questioning because that’s what the characters must do in order to escape (once they have found that just ‘keeping kind’ doesn’t work.) 

Educated

In thinking about FLDS, my mind hopped to Tara Westover’s Memoir Educated because, while the family is ostensibly LDS, their practices are paranoid and cultish.¹ I wrote a review of Educated on School Library Lady when it came out. I thought it was a great adult book for teen readers. 

I jumped into the Educated rabbit hole because I thought it was being made into a movie or cable series. While I was looking for that, I stumbled upon this review of Westover’s mother's counter-memoir, entitled Educating. The reviewer details all aspects of the book and shows that none of it adds up to much of anything (and in part, accidentally validates Tara’s narrative). Then the reviewer ends with a sort of both-sides-ism in an effort to be polite, which blew off her review. (Keep sweet—ugh!) The details of the review are interesting and the comments and responses are very interesting. (Educated is fact checked, so Tara’s version of the story holds more weight.) In addition to learning about the book, we learn that members of the LDS Church (including the reviewer) don't particularly like to be called Mormons anymore. Noted.²

Rabbit holes have connecting tunnels

I wrote a short story, “Solvent,” in which LDS missionaries, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and a New Age neighbor converge on a menopausal woman’s house all at once. It’s in my collection Acts of Contrition. The New Age neighbor is involved in MLM (multilevel marketing) and tries to sell her products to everyone there.

Since I was thinking about the mindset of cultishness, I wondered if there was validation out there for my sense that people with religious magical thinking are more likely to be involved with MLM. I found this YouTube episode by a couple, who refer to themselves as former Mormons, discussing why LDS beliefs prime people for MLM schemes. 

The Connection Between MLMs, Mormons, & Utah: An Ex-Mormon Deep Dive

Pretty interesting.

I feel I need a little disclaimer here so that I don’t misrepresent myself. I’m thinking someone reading all this might think I’m anti-religion/anti-Christian, which is far from the truth. I love Jesus’ radical message of love and care. My issue is with patriarchy and all the problems it causes. My issue is with the misogyny of some religions, including the Catholicism I grew up with. 

If you are like me and can’t get enough stories of patriarchal religion and its fallout, check out

Constance Ford

’s Substack

State of Wonder

about her break with evangelical fundamentalism and

lyz

’s book This American Ex-wife.

Small presses

Since my cult novel will be published by a small press, I want to include some small press and literary journal news from this week that might help you on your publication journey.

Jane Friedman’s newsletter had a guest post by Julie Artz this week for anyone thinking of submitting their novel to a small press. 

Your Small Press Submission Checklist

Journals

Thanks to

Becky Tuch

in

Lit Mag News

for posting the following links to rankings of literary journals:

https://cliffordgarstang.com/2024-literary-magazine-rankings-overview/

https://www.erikakrousewriter.com/erika-krouses-ocd-ranking-of-483-literary-magazines-for-short-fiction

Erin Michaela Sweeney

posted this week on

100 Rejections Club

about online resources that help you find places to submit your work.

#0032 Oh, The Places You’ll Go (To Submit)

Big presses

Since I’m on the subject of submissions, and since some of us are also looking for agents for our next novel,³ let me note a helpful webinar I saw this week.

Agent Emmy Nordstrom Higdon (Westwood Creative Artists) did a free webinar on crowdcast for Manuscript Academy. Their format is like that of TSNOTYAW (which I have discussed before and whose podcast you should listen to if you are querying). Higdon uses different labels than TSNOTYAW.  Paragraphs are: metadata, summary (not a synopsis), bio. Higdon also includes a query letter checklist (very helpful). They also have a good summary of what is needed on the first page.

Libraries and book challenges

The same disclaimer as always: there’s a lot more library and book challenge news than what I post each week, so these are what most interested me. 

If you didn’t see John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight on May 5, 2024, please watch it in its entirety. Meanwhile here’s an article from the Guardian about it:

John Oliver on public libraries: ‘Another front in the ongoing culture war’

BOOK BANNERS TAKE THE FIGHT TO PUBLIC LIBRARIES

Amid skyrocketing book bans in public school libraries, heightened rhetoric describing LGBTQ+ and sex education content as “obscene” or “pornographic” has also proliferated across public libraries from Alabama to California. The rhetoric fuels mass challenges against long lists of books or “types” of books, heightened restrictions on access to literature, and board-level fights. The sum effect is an emaciated public sphere in which students can’t access literature at school or in their broader communities. 

And from Salon: "Doesn’t feel like a coincidence": John Oliver alarmed over right-wing efforts to censor libraries

I’ve haven’t read the YA novel This Book Won’t Burn yet (i believe it’s pre-pub), but I like the example of ‘soft censorship’ author Samira Ahmed gives in this under-five-minute interview. Having worked in schools for decades, I know this happens all the time. 

Book bans in California? How lawmakers, book stores defend diverse literature choices

In February, Capital Books on K in Sacramento’s downtown received a two-star review critical of the store’s children’s book section. It was Black History Month, and the store was adorned with posters of Black children, families and books to celebrate African American literature. “Children’s section is littered with woke leftist ideologue literature,” the review read. “However, it was nice that the children’s section had a small chair and bean bags.”

. . .

AB 1825 would require libraries to establish a book challenging process for community members where criticism could not stem from “the origin, background, or views of those contributing to the creation of the materials,” the bill proposes. Additionally, a book could not be banned because the topics addressed or opinions expressed in the literature. This requirement seeks to protect stories about LGBTQ+ and communities of color from being disproportionately targeted.

Book ban: Horry County school board members should find their spines 

Moms for Liberty, which has long pretended it is just about protecting the precious little children, showed its hand recently. The group petitioned the Horry County Board of Education to ban a book that had been available only for adults. The board dutifully and cowardly went along.

. . .

I asked Warner how a book designated for adults could be dangerous to “our young students.”

“I do not believe that the sexually explicit material in ‘The Freedom Writers’ book makes a teacher better informed to teach his or her students,” he said. “Ensuring children are shielded from inappropriate content extends to examining the teacher training and resources used in schools. It’s important for us to question educational materials to safeguard our children’s learning environment.”

Why Book Bans Are Bad for Mental Health

Banning books may increase mental health risk and reduce empathy.

The reality is that everyone loses when books are banned because it discourages reading, turning our attention toward social media, web surfing, and television, which negatively impacts the brain’s ability to sustain attention, reduces long-term memory formation and retrieval, and discourages analytical thinking (Firth J, et al, 2019). Additionally, this kind of censorship increases discrimination as readers get the message that certain groups of people and topics are “bad,” closing our minds to the opportunity to learn, which is really what reading is all about (Vogels, E., et al, 2021).

Bill to Protect Colorado Libraries From Book Bans Passes House

What I’m reading

I finished The Vunerables by Sigrid Nunez. This short novel is about getting through life with a focus on COVIS lockdown: strangers thrown together and helping one another, a parrot. In all this, it asks about the significance of writing. Great stuff, highly recommend. 

What I’m watching

I’m still binging Big Love. The modern polygamist family it follows isn’t anything like the polygamist colony of Warren Jeffs, but the compound from which the husband comes is very much a Warren Jeffs/FLSD thing.

1. What “cultishness” is: refer to Amanda Montell’s book Cultish, which I discussed in my post  a few weeks ago. 

2. I know this hasn’t always been the case. The church’s “I’m a Mormon” campaign wasn’t so very long ago. 

3. The novel I’m querying is set in a high school with a book banning conflict—if you know of Substacks about book bans, clue me in!