<![CDATA[RIE LEE - Subscriber newsletter archive]]>Sun, 26 Apr 2026 20:53:24 -0700Weebly<![CDATA[the apocalypse, the challenger explosion, and cooperation]]>Sat, 25 Apr 2026 23:13:29 GMThttps://www.riewrites.org/vessel-blog/the-apocalypse-the-challenger-explosion-and-cooperation1026557
Originally sent November 26, 2025
​
Dear friends:

The apocalypse is small, when you think about it. 

It's a blip in time and space. Something that's a tipping point to one side or another in so many people all at once, and because it's such a significant tilt in each individual, it feels massive. A tidal wave in a bottle. 

So much has been happening at all levels of our worlds recently. I've had the blessing of having appropriate medical care to heal my nervous system lately, and I'm writing to you today from a place of optimism from outside the storm. In a lot of ways, this optimism is a privilege -- a sign that I'm comfortable enough in my life that I'm able to feel optimism at all. But I also see it as a responsibility to share that energy while I have it. 

I discovered this book a few weeks ago called A Field Guide to the Apocalypse by Athena Aktipis, a very busy psychology professor at Arizona State University who is super into cooperation -- so much so that she runs a bunch of organizations I didn't know existed, and they give me a lot of hope for the End Times(TM): 

Holding a copy of A FIELD GUIDE TO THE APOCALYPSE: A MOSTLY SERIOUS GUIDE TO SURVIVING OUR WILD TIMES by Athena Aktipis. The book has an orange cover with a flaming comet, the silhouette of two humans high-fiving, and a little seal that says,
I ended up starting to update a different book instead of working on Sapphic Space Aladdin (which is still forthcoming, don't worry!). It's a prequel of sorts to Vessel, but it's been living rent-free in my mind because instead of being a post-apocalyptic story like Vessel, it's a pre-apocalyptic one. The build-up to the apocalypse, if you will -- and what it's like to live as a young person in one. The lack of hope of any personal future, or even that there is a future at all. 

This lack of hope is what tends to lead to endless loops of doomscrolling -- which leads people further into the algorithm. 

Which is what leads people into cults. 

These cults aren't always visible, and they're not always organized. Mini-cults occur constantly with no formal agenda (remember, we call them 'cults' for short, but really they're high-control environments). Cults are often an endless loop of people constantly trying to chase some version of perfection, or resigning themselves to the inevitability of societal collapse while preparing themselves and their loved ones for surviving it. 

People fall prey to this kind of thinking because it feels like control over uncontrollable circumstances. It's visceral, inescapable, like it's the only thing that is possible to be experiencing. The trick of getting people out of that kind of mindset is incredibly difficult, and tends to really be 50-50 on whether it works, depending on how far the victim is at rock-bottom. So the real path forward here is prevention. 

And to get to prevention, we have to face the vague, intangible concept of apocalypse head-on. 

What I love about Dr Aktipis's work is that it offers practical advice on what apocalypses look like. Rome didn't fall in a day, much like the Challenger didn't explode randomly. Each of these failures were the result of collapses in systems, which were the result of dysfunctional cooperation.

As Michelle La Vone writes in Space Safety Magazine:  

​[Richard] Feynman, a famous physicist and Nobel Prize laureate with a distinct distaste for corruption and red tape, was the subject of the 2013 movie “The Challenger Disaster.” Although he had little demonstrated knowledge of, or interest in, space, his motivation to uncover the truth about Challenger was palpable. Ignoring requests to remain in close proximity to the team in Washington, Feynman boarded a plane and visited unannounced the facilities of Morton Thiokol, the firm responsible for manufacturing the shuttle’s booster rockets. He interviewed Thiokol employees wherever he could—the lunchroom, the hallway, the manufacturing floor—and quickly realized a great fracture in communication between the engineers, manufacturers, and managers both at Morton Thiokol and NASA. As the investigation continued, he discovered a disturbing lack of technical understanding in some of NASA’s highest-ranking managers. The dots became increasingly easier to connect: recklessness and oversight were directly linked to the tragic accident, and Feynman would later demonstrate, on national television, just how much.
Side note: I actually worked with Richard Feynman's sister, Joan Feynman, in my early days at my company. She worked on some brilliant stuff -- including, apparently (because I was a lowly assistant and just made sure her computer was fine and she had office space and whatever), identifying the mechanism that leads to the formation of auroras and researching the role of climate stabilization in agriculture development. She doesn't get as much notice as Richard, so this is my effort to bring attention to the crucial work she did to discover the literal origins of the universe. 

And I'm going to go off on a bit of a tangent for a minute here, but it'll come back around, I promise. Bear with me. 

It was at this same company where, a few years after I worked with Joan, I learned about the concept of process improvement. In my Lean Six Sigma training, I learned about how improving processes to eliminate repetitive human labor had nothing to do with removing jobs and everything to do with shifting human contributions to value-added skills. Meaning: instead of having people creating the same machine component over and over again, get them to work on the systems around that. Machines are great for repetitive work; humans are great for innovative work. (Generally speaking. Sometimes humans really like to do repetitive work and that is still incredibly valuable depending on the circumstance.) As we start to automate more and more tasks in our everyday lives, that doesn't reduce the value of human labor; it provides space for humans to work on new problems. 

The problem is: the people at the top of these systems really like having unchecked power. Doesn't even matter what the system is; the power itself is addictive. And the best way to keep that power unchecked is to prevent lateral cooperation. 

That is to say: cooperation = resistance. 

Challenger ultimately failed because of a toxic work environment. Work environments are just systems of human cooperation, and when I say "toxic," I mean environments where power dynamics and consolidated amongst a select few, and in which where people are afraid to upset that power dynamic because it would affect their direct livelihood. So people shut up and carry out whatever tasks they're given just so they can survive. Which -- if you've been following some of my previous newsletters, is how cults work. 

If people had had a work environment that had allowed people to speak freely and contribute as the common objective required, they would have been able to meet in the middle and troubleshoot in a way that would have resulted in all of the astronauts on that shuttle surviving. The entire story could have been different. Instead of American tragedy, it could have been American celebration. Massive national bragging rights cementing the US's rightfully earned place at the top of the era's shuttle ecosystem. 

But, as La Vone writes:
Blinded by the success of the early Shuttle flights, [NASA]'s management had developed a careless attitude towards warnings coming from the engineering community. NASA had committed the Shuttle to an impossible schedule even before it entered in service in order to ensure funding. ​
This also happened with Artemis in 2020 when the Trump administration committed to "boots on the moon by 2024," but luckily people managed to realize the impossibility of this demand and didn't risk human safety over an impossible schedule -- progress, I suppose. La Vone continues:
Over time, NASA management had grown increasingly impatient with the technical delays that operating such a complex machine required.​

All that ended on the bitter cold morning of January 28th 1986, when seven astronauts lost their lives in front of family, friends, and millions of TV viewers. A vehicle that was celebrated for its technical prowess broke up 73 seconds into the flight, burning nearly 2 million liters of fuel in just a few seconds, creating a sinister cloud of gas that still plagues the memory of anyone who saw it.
So--

  • Cooperation = the antidote to tyranny. 
  • Cooperation = how we prevent disasters like Challenger. 
  • Cooperation = how we work together, regardless of the situation. How we get ourselves out of the massive messes we get ourselves into. 
  • Cooperation = how we get through the apocalypse. 
    ​
Now for those of you (okay, us) who are stressing out about the end of the American government, this is especially applicable. Especially in this time of misery and political divide, it's crucial to remember that ultimately, we are all neighbors working together to prevent our mutual demise. 

I came across this article talking about how we might "recode" our government systems and thought it was pretty interesting. This particularly resonated with me:
Our politics have become so chaotic in part because the public has lost trust in the government’s ability to deliver on its promises. Restoring this public trust is both a moral and a political imperative for leaders who want to leave their mark.
Screenshot from recodingamerica.fund. Text reads:
The takeaway here is that people are thinking about how to make things better. Things aren't hopeless. When we start to work on problems, they tend to get ugly before they get better -- and friends, we are in the midst of ugly. But we're also at the tip of better. 

[Insert "just the tip" joke here] 

Things are connected. Losing a series of battles doesn't mean that idealism is dead. It just needs to be reinvented, and as Dr Aktipis recommends in her book (and her entire life's work), what we need most during the apocalypse (and in our government, and everywhere) is cooperation. 

When it comes to the US government, this means recognizing that the state of things is not static. I've been watching a lot of videos by YouTuber Zaid Tabani recently that have provided much reassurance in this arena with comparisons of the time we're in to the early aughts as a reminder that...
...there’s really nothing special about this point in time. People have been experiencing and preparing for disasters since the dawn of time. So yes, it may feel like we are experiencing an apocalypse right now, but it’s always felt that way.
​
--Athena Atkipis
All this said, I've been diving deep into revising a book I wrote originally during Covid lockdown. I'm looking forward to sharing some snippets of it when I get to my next newsletter, whenever the heck that'll be (these take me a long time to write, okay). But for now, the TL;DR is that there are many apocalypses, and if you're worried about them, that's a sign that you care, but make sure you're thinking about them in a practical manner instead of doomscrolling. 
​
Like reading speculative fiction and taking some great lessons-learned from that. 

From, you know. A certain spec-fic author you like. Whose book is on sale for 10% off for the rest of SCBWI's annual BookStop sale. 😁

Right now, with SCBWI BookStop, you can get your copy of Vessel just in time for end-of-year gift-giving for a whopping 10% off! Whopping. I know. Click the logo above to get access to this Super Fancy Deal that ends on December 4th. If you're looking for a gift for that person in your life you love so much but who also kindasorta tried to convert you a few times between fifth and tenth grades and who finally came out as gay twenty years later, what better time to buy a copy than now? 

You can also find Vessel in person, on shelves, at these incredible local bookstores who have my heart forever: 

They are all queer-affirming bookstores, so if you're in the San Gabriel Valley area and you want to explore some cool bookstores, you ABSOLUTELY should. You don't even have to buy the book; just go and check out their cool spaces. 

Now's the time, folks. We combat capitalism by way of mutual aid, and relying on your local businesses instead of corporate giants is the best way to do that.  
​​

events

It's been a delightful month-and-change hanging out in the books community with my fellow writers and readers. This book has been an amazing chance to engage with long-time friends and new community alike, and I'm excited for new conversations to be had in new spaces in different permutations of people. Plus, I got to use my really obnoxious giant banner! And it was actually effective! (Helloooo to those of you I got to meet because of it!) ​
More to come soon. Until next time! And if you have any thoughts or just want to say hi, hit me up. I always love to talk about cults and information and apocalypses. 

<3 rie

from the archives

Picture
A huge part of my life is pacifism by way of community engagement. I run an organization called Voting Study Party with some friends, which aims to de-escalate and depolarize political conversations among neighbors and friends by guiding individuals on how to make studying down-ballot issues a fun, social activity. The materials on our website emphasize learning together and guiding people on how to ask questions with an intent to gather knowledge and not to challenge someone else’s deeply held belief.

- from How to Prevent Extremism: Information Access as a Method of De-escalation
]]><![CDATA[some notes on the patriarchy]]>Tue, 13 Jan 2026 18:37:10 GMThttps://www.riewrites.org/vessel-blog/some-notes-on-the-patriarchy
Originally sent October 14, 2025

Hi, friends, 

Today is going to hit many folks in my immediate community hard. My workplace is undergoing yet another round of layoffs, and after nearly a thousand people getting laid off in four waves last year, and the fast and steady decimation of the US government, it's been traumatic for those of us in and supporting civil service. 

We've been exhausted. Burnt out. Needing support, and getting met with punches every step of the way. Our reasonable accommodations have been denied. Our job market is dire. Our infrastructure is crumbling around us. The rhetoric everywhere is detrimental, pulling the weight of daily existence down beyond the ground and far beneath the earth. 

It can feel like we'll stay there forever. 

But we haven't lost yet. 

Every day, someone new speaks up. Every day, something new gives us hope. Every day, we still have access to public resources that have not died yet. We still have access to freedoms that have not been removed yet. Or that have been removed and returned. 

We have lost our hope, but we haven't lost everything. It's still here. 

Things are changing. Sometimes for the worse, yes. It's undoubtedly exhausting. But the destruction of our system is incomplete. And those parts that have broken present an opportunity for change. 

Because even when our systems are dead, we are not yet.

We can still rebuild. And now that we know how to do it better, we can make it better at the beginning this time. 

We can share information still. We can learn still. We can teach still. 

And today, I want to share the learning process of someone who has actively engaged in that process, changing into various shapes over time and continuously learning and growing -- the stuff of life. 

For your consideration. Hope it resonates with you like it resonated with me. Sometimes, internal transformation is the way to create peace -- internally, and societally. 

(The bolding is my own editorial, but all the words are the author's.) 
Edited Film Photo of a Person Wearing a White Glove Holding a Burning Flower
Image source: Lany-Jade Mondou (https://www.pexels.com/@lany/)

​Your Beliefs Are Your State of Being

by Anna Wooten

I’ve been on a journey of deprogramming the beliefs I inherited from a toxic religious & patriarchal upbringing. These beliefs left me deeply disconnected from my Authentic Self.

Now I do my best to choose my beliefs consciously, by decolonizing my inner systems. 

I’ve been shaping new beliefs that root me in love, spirituality, and shared humanity.

Yet, reprogramming ourselves isn’t simple. We slip back into the same patterns we were raised in, only dressed up in new language. The ego is creative. It can disguise itself in any tradition.

That’s why it takes real work to pause, look at ourselves honestly, and notice our impact. Because spiritual narcissism is alive and well, and the patriarchy leaks into our spaces, because both live inside of us.

Spiritual narcissism is when spirituality becomes a tool for self-importance, using spiritual language, practices, or status to elevate ourselves above others instead of growing in humility, compassion, and connection. It is the ego disguised as enlightenment.

The patriarchy is the system that upholds dominance, control, and hierarchy. It silences voices. It shames sexuality. It shames women. It shames cultural, racial, and religious differences. It separates us from wholeness. It creeps into spiritual spaces as easily as religious ones.

So how do we make sure we are REALLY breaking patterns?

Questions to Check Your Beliefs:
​
  • Do your beliefs call you to care for your neighbor?
  • Do they invite you to examine the impact of your actions on others?
  • Do they help you move beyond self-centeredness and narcissism?
  • Do they integrate mind, body, heart, and spirit?
  • Do they guide you toward supporting your community?
  • Do they inspire you to notice and change the systems that cause harm?
  • Our beliefs show us who we are becoming. And who do you want to become?

​
]]><![CDATA[[Book Event!] This Saturday, 10/11 - see me for National Coming Out Day at Underdog Bookstore]]>Mon, 13 Oct 2025 14:56:16 GMThttps://www.riewrites.org/vessel-blog/book-event-this-saturday-1011-see-me-for-national-coming-out-day-at-underdog-bookstore
​Originally sent October 7, 2025

Hi, friends, 

The exhaustion has been hitting me hard. Little breaks here and there have not been enough. So now I'm taking a longer break, trying to restore some normalcy to my poor nervous system. It's been extremely helpful, and I've been feeling more hopeful. 

If you, too, have been hit hard by chronic exhaustion, don't forget that to "exhaust" means "to use up or consume completely; expend the whole of" (Dictionary.com). When you use something up, there's no more of it. And when the "it" is energy, or hope, and you've got no more, and you try to spend more of what you don't have, where does it come from? 

Your body. 

It eats away at us. Our bodies start breaking down, literally. They stop working and start being a heap of bones on the floor. 

And when you're a pile of bones, you can't help anyone. Because you're the one who needs help. 

I don't say that in a derogatory way. Needing help isn't a bad thing. But when you're someone who likes to help others, this is a reminder to get your own oxygen mask on first. You can't help others if you're in a heap yourself. 

Anyhow, all this is to say that I've been delaying writing my next message to you all because I've been putting myself back together. But you know what helps me put myself back together? 

Community! :) 

So I'd love to see you at my next event! It's happening this Saturday, October 11th, at 1 PM at Underdog Bookstore in Monrovia, CA.

What better way to celebrate Banned Books Week and National Coming Out Day than supporting a queer Latine author in a conversation with another queer author about how they came out?

My friend Scott Coon and I are having a discussion about the intersection of queerness and spirituality. As most of you know by now, Vessel is the story of a true believer trying to ignore her own queerness in her high-control religious environment, based on the story of yours truly. Come and listen to Scott and me chatting about cults, afterlives, and a dash of aliens--and how we both came out, ultimately arriving at a place of peace with our spirituality and our selves. 
]]><![CDATA[cults happen through information control.]]>Wed, 01 Oct 2025 23:09:30 GMThttps://www.riewrites.org/vessel-blog/cults-happen-through-information-control
Originally sent June 30, 2025

Dearest readers: 

It's been a while since I've written because it's been an exhausting couple of months. I'm downtrodden from the constant displays of cruelty, domestically and internationally. All it does is make me want to write, but then I'm too exhausted to write. I need some levity and light. 

So I've decided which of my existing books will be published next: tentatively titled DON'T YOU DARE CLOSE YOUR EYES, a YA sapphic retelling of Disney's "Aladdin" set on an exoplanet with significant Latinx/Mezoamerican cultural influences. I have some vacation time coming up, during which I'll be rewriting the book, and I hope to publish it in 2026 or 2027. Keep an eye out for more! I'm thinking of releasing some excerpts through this newsletter.  

All right, I promised you more substance last time, so here it is. Be careful what you wish for, because this one's a long one (but also lovingly curated, so feel free to skip through and check out all of the awesome resources). 

 
combating cults through building community

​Anyone who knows me knows I'm a little (understatement) cult-obsessed. I grew up in a culty environment, and I've been obsessed with researching them, understanding them, and recognizing them as an adult. Cults have a reputation of being creepy or evil, with imagery like shiny happy people in all white having mass weddings or group baptisms, but these are misconceptions that prevent cults from being recognized in the first place. 

Today, I'm here to teach you a couple of key things about cults. 

First off, the word "cult" is actually not super helpful. For one, there's no universal definition of cult -- mostly because it can look like many things. Instead, I prefer to use the term "high-control environment," or HCE, because cults are ultimately unchecked environments -- not necessarily formal groups, since this behavior can be a one-on-one relationship or exist in a smaller familial space -- of coercive control. That brings me to my next point: 

Cults are sneaky.

They use words like "love" to dupe you into doing whatever they want so that you seek acceptance. They claim they love you and that's why they're doing whatever they're doing. This is the claim that extremist religions like to use: 

god loves you, so he wants to make sure you don't stray far from the path, and that's why I, your human parent, have to beat you. Because I love you like god loves you. I am protecting your eternal salvation. I'm physically beating you so that you'll learn -- so that you'll remember how painful this is and avoid this behavior in the future. Because I love you. 

I've said this before, but high-control groups thrive on information control. If a world is all you know, you aren't free to pursue anything different. Your survival starts to depend on conforming to what you know, because the information control starts to turn into behavior control. If you don't know a different definition of "love," you're trained to see this behavior as love. When you see other behaviors -- like parents who don't beat their children when the children have done something wrong -- you start to see that compassionate behavior as a lack of love. 

You pity others who are experiencing bodily autonomy. And when they pity you, in turn, for regularly experiencing violence by the hand of people who claim to love you, you doubt yourself for just a second. 

Until they judge you. 

And then you're back in. Because their judgment is exactly what your parents told you would happen. The outsiders just don't understand what's at stake here. They're just going to burn in hell one day. Everlasting torture in the afterlife for momentary peace here. You pity them again, and you walk away from them. What do they know about you and your family? Your family loves you. 

The big takeaway here is that stigma leads to cults. Stigma leads to judgment, which in turn leads to keeping people in cults. When people feel afraid, they double down on their beliefs, because they can't handle the ego hit.

We, the outsiders, in turn, can do one of two things: judge them for not being able to take the ego hit, or give them a safe space to land when they take the hit. 

The massive amount of fascism happening right now in the US and worldwide is terrifying. It's debilitating. Somedays, personally, I just can't. But on the days that I can, I remember that fascism happens by way of widespread culture. And culture only gets widespread when each of us as individuals decide how to interact with others, one on one. 

When someone says something like "homosexuality should be illegal," you can respond in a few ways. 

The judgment way is, "you're a homophobe." This results in the other person doubling down, and makes the situation worse. It re-emphasizes the divide in our culture. 

The self-care way is, "sorry, I have a headache and I need to go take care of myself." This results in neutrality, which -- because you have not triggered the other person's defences -- is a net positive. 

The compassionate way is, "why do you think that?" This results in the other person having to provide rationale. As a friend, or a family member, this one-on-one interaction is an opportunity to not fight but to understand. Neutral responses with things you don't agree with like "I didn't know that about you" when it comes to sharing their beliefs can result in non-judgments that can (but won't necessarily) trigger self-reflection. Either way, you come away from it not as an opponent but as someone they can trust later on if they want to talk more, if they're curious or interested. It's either neutral or positive.  

It's not about giving compassion to n*zis; it's about doing what's effective. 

This is not a recommendation for people who are down and just can't. If you can't, you can't. In that case, don't engage at all. Reclaim your space. You don't need to offer your energy to people who drain you. 

BUT don't make it worse. Reserve your energy -- and your judgment. 

Culture change happens one relationship at a time. 

We don't create culture change by approaching groups; we create the change by accepting individuals. 
An us/them mentality also helps if you can make the “them” seem unsafe — then the member has to run back to “us” for security.

-- Daniel Midgley, The Word of Wisdom: “A Principle with Promise”
The quote above is from another person who does lots of cult thinking: Daniel Midgley of several initiatives, one of which is Gospel Doctrine for the Godless. The blog is, as the tagline says, an "ex-Mormon take on LDS Sunday School lessons," and I discovered this particular writer/linguist when I was looking for a handwriting font with a free commercial license to utilize in Vessel. He created the font I use for Sol's interludes in the print version of the book! He's got a lot of interesting thoughts on deconstruction and all the idiosyncrasies that come with high-control religion, and I highly recommend giving his blog(s) a read. If you want an amusing place to start, check out his comic on de-baptisms. ​
Page from VESSEL in Daniel handwriting font.
Page from VESSEL in Daniel handwriting font.

​ 
vessel updates

There's been so much that's happened on the Vessel book tour lately! I haven't really been able to keep up with informing y'all about it. I'm going to bullet-point this so I at least get something out. 

Rie Lee, Jennifer Yu, and Emily Ladd at Spokane Public Library
GetLit! 2025. Photo credit: Annie Burky
Janet Wertman, Anne Louise Bannon, Gerry Gainford, Scott Coon, and Rie Lee at a table with a black tablecloth
LitFest at the Dena, 2025. Photo credit: Brian Biery (https://brianbiery.com/)
Rie Lee on a sunny Spokane sidewalk, featuring green grass, in Browne's Addition
GetLit! 2025, me in Browne's Addition. Photo credit: Emily Hiller
Book display in front of a brick wall. Standing up are VESSEL, TURTLES OF THE MIDNIGHT MOON, and GRIEF IN THE FOURTH DIMENSION.
Book display at GetLit! 2025. Photo credit: Rie Lee
Janet Wertman, Anne Louise Bannon, Gerry Gainford, Scott Coon, and Rie Lee standing holding their books. VESSEL is upside-down.
LitFest at the Dena, 2025. Photo credit: Brian Biery (https://brianbiery.com/)

​ 
did you know your library has . . . ?

In other practical ways of preventing information secrecy, I want to call attention to libraries: the heroes we don't deserve. 

Libraries support a plethora of public services and are central hubs of information of all kinds. The thing that makes them awesome is that the information is free, and that the resources they have provide support for all folks from all walks of life. They don't limit certain kinds of experiences. They provide access to all kinds of experiences. That's why book bans are so shitty: they want to take away access to these experiences, because those experiences don't fit in with a certain group of people's experiences. They're taking away stuff from the broader group so that the smaller group gets to decide what the broader group gets to be. And that, my friends, is information control. 

Which, I'd like to remind you, is a hallmark of cults/HCEs. 

The best way to combat this is to support groups like Authors Against Book Bans and -- most critically -- to use your public library. 

I love getting to tell people about all the free stuff you can get from libraries. I also like to let them know that they can often get a library card even if they don't live in the area! In California, you can get a library card to multiple library systems. I live in LA County and I was able to get a card for Orange County's system. Check out the systems in your area and see what you can sign up for. 

And through these catalogs, you can get access to: 

. . . ALL FOR FREE. 

You don't need amaz*n to get audiobooks, folks. You can get them for free from your library. You win, the author wins, the library wins. When you get stuff from amaz*n, we all lose. 

IN FACT! To show you how free and awesome all of this is, you can read Vessel (again, for FREEEEEEE) from these library resources: 

​
If you want to have physical copies in your local library, request it! They usually ask for an ISBN (979-8-9913862-0-3), title (Vessel: a novel), and author (Rie Lee). 

 
where to buy vessel

If you'd rather have your own copy to keep, you can find Vessel in person, on shelves, at these incredible local bookstores who have my heart forever. They are all queer-affirming bookstores, so if you're in the San Gabriel Valley area and you want to explore some cool bookstores, you ABSOLUTELY should. You don't even have to buy the book; just go and check out their cool spaces. ​

Now's the time, folks. We combat capitalism by way of mutual aid, and relying on your local businesses instead of corporate giants is the best way to do that.  
Find Vessel on online at: ​

​ 
btw, have you heard of . . . ?


​Callisto Tea House
wooden board with teacups and an earthenware teapot featuring loose-leaf tea
Image taken from Callisto's instagram (https://www.instagram.com/callistoteahouse/)

​I absolutely love this place. I recently got a super-cool Drag King History box from Callisto, and the shop supports all kinds of cool events (including, most recently, Altadena Pride event!). The proprietors make a point of not just selling incredible tea, but bringing historically marginalized people into the tea marketplace -- they "seek out women-owned estates, farms, producers, and distributors of tea, as well as women artists for many of the images on [their] site." If you're looking for a cute place to host an event, or a tea tasting to check out some truly incredible teas, give them a visit. Or if you're not in the SGV area, they ship specialty teas! ​
]]><![CDATA[resistance = defying amaz*n]]>Fri, 02 May 2025 18:10:52 GMThttps://www.riewrites.org/vessel-blog/resistance-defying-amazn
Originally sent April 26, 2025

Dearest readers,

Firstly, hello to those of you who are new! I'll have more time to craft a proper intro later, but right now I'm running out of time so I wanted to send you this quick message.

Tomorrow is the last day of the San Gabriel Valley Book Crawl, which features six independent bookstores in the SGV area that are each awesome in their own right, but also absolutely know how to check in on each other and work together -- because they're run by humans who know each other and live in the area in which they work and are personally invested in the people around them. 

Unlike Jeff Bez*s, who intentionally placed an Amaz*n book sale on Independent Bookstore Day (today!) to undermine local booksellers. grumbles in expletives

If you don't believe me about Amaz*n, check out this article from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance on how the company actively harms small businesses so that it can dominate the market. This is, of course, the very same approach the richest people in the US are taking toward everyone else who's just trying to live their lives around here, and often, as a little guy, it's hard to feel like we have any power. ​

But you do have power. You can push back. It's not about the power of the dollar; it's about having face-to-face interactions (or online interactions, if that's not possible) with your local booksellers, who curate books by hand so that they can met the needs of their communities. So they can contribute to intellectual freedom. As MindBrewery puts it: 
"At the heart of the renaissance of local bookstores is their ability to create a sense of community. Unlike their digital counterparts, these stores serve as hubs of social interaction. They are places where people meet, exchange ideas, and participate in events that enrich the local culture. From book signings and readings by local authors to workshops and book clubs, these spaces offer a plethora of activities that foster a sense of belonging and community engagement."

And when you support indie bookstores, you also support indie ideas. Things that sell, often, in spite of the algorithm. So if you were waiting to buy a book, today's the day to buy it. Buy it at a place that values your community and makes you feel welcome. And if you can't be in person, take advantage of Bookshop.org's free shipping today. Plus, they have a free ebook right now called How to Resist Amazon and Why that you can download. You can read it on whatever e-reader you want, including Bookshop's own!

If you aren't in the SGV area, find out what local indie bookstores are in your area. Walk in. Browse. Absorb some ideas. You don't have to even buy anything; just walk in and smell the pages -- the dust, the glue, the wood of bookshelves, the musky carpets. Give a half-hearted nod to the bookshop owner. Say hi. Or not. Just be.   

If you're in the SGV area, check out these amazing bookstores -- four of which carry my book! It's a story about a girl who deconstructs from her high-control religion and reckons with her own self-identity. Thematic, innit. And depressing. A little bit hopeful. Plus you get a sweet queer love story.  ​

Anyhow, that's all for now. More soon.

<3 rie
]]><![CDATA[A few updates: the book, America, and kindness]]>Sun, 02 Mar 2025 05:34:52 GMThttps://www.riewrites.org/vessel-blog/a-few-updates-the-book-america-and-kindness
Originally sent February 10, 2025
"I've been reading and learning about cults, high control religions, and the ongoing impacts these can have on those who grow up within in, even if they make it out. This book, while a futuristic parable, nonetheless shows the insidiousness of the messaging, and the confusion a person feels when they are starting to question everything they were taught to believe. While the ending of this book feels abrupt to me as a reader, it rings true in the sense that it's the end of Paige's story in New Standard. Whatever comes next? Is unknown.

A recommended read."
Thanks to Dee Morgan for the review on LibraryThing!
It's dark times, y'all. But you know what's cool? Reading. Books. Perseverance. (Both the spacecraft and the concept.) 

I want to start out with a massive thank you to those of you who were able to make it to the release party on January 4th! It was a fantastic night of friends connecting with friends, and it was so, so needed as a way to kick off the year. ​
Book launch: Four people standing in a bookstore talking to each other. Two people are holding a copy of VESSEL by Rie Lee.
Photo credit: Adriana Redditt
I was hoping that the high of getting to put this book out in the world and having the privilege of folks in my community read it would last a little longer. But of course, we couldn't have that. I'm sure it's because we're all sinners or whatever. Sodom and Gomorrah and all that jazz. 

There are plenty of high-control groups out there that will use that exact rhetoric to describe the fires that plagued my community over the past month and the massive devastation it caused to the land and the people who live on and care for it: that we were impure and therefore deserved it. That, among other things, our penchant for ensuring that the diversity of our communities can flourish by way of equity and inclusion is an everlasting plague that should continue to hurt us until we surrender to the oligarchy that uses extremist patriarchal religion to control and harm all of us. 

And right now, I want to be clear: that rhetoric is being utilized right now by the United States Federal Government. Right now, the US Government is a high-control group, no question. 

Pushing back on these ideas is exhausting but necessary. The more I experience the collection of humans in Washington, DC plotting the demise of any labor-valuing system, the more frustrated I get with the demonization of anyone but that collection of humans. The more I start to consciously think about what we all have in common, the more I realize that what I want for myself is also what I want for others who might be across the political aisle. I want people to make more money and take away some of the capital being horded by our current powers-that-be. I want people to feel like they're in charge of their lives and their religious beliefs.  I want people to have solid homes and access to good education for their kids. I want them to have a savings account and all of the basic necessities of life without having to hustle with three jobs. 

I'm trying, lately, to try to create a sense of power for myself by way of finding basic commonality with my fellow humans, regardless of political affiliation. We're all suffering now; all of us are subject to price gouging and the vulnerabilities that come with losing workers' protections and healthcare. We are in a high-control environment right now, and that high-control environment has affected our neighbors and friends and family members. The best way to combat a high-control environment is to create a calm, safe space free of judgment. ​
Maroon background with mauve and cream text. Text reads,
From peopleleavecults.com
So that's what I'm doing now: trying to connect with people and create community, to reserve my energy for building and not destroying. I'm trying to focus on what's in front of me and provide hope and resilience, to focus on practicalities, and to sleep when I feel like I'm losing hope. Sometimes, I google things like "what people are doing to resist" and come up with hope like this. 

I also read. I resist by reading and sharing books and visiting libraries and encouraging other people to get library cards. I visit my libraries and participate in programming, because there's always a plethora of (free!) things to do through libraries, including movie nights and borrowing Lovevery kits and using 3-D printers and community clothing swaps. 

I connect with people in person. I reach out to friends when I'm feeling down and I need help. And I hope you, my dear reader, reach out, too. ​
]]><![CDATA[Heretics]]>Tue, 10 Dec 2024 14:32:15 GMThttps://www.riewrites.org/vessel-blog/heretics
Mott wasn’t saying goodbye. Why wasn’t she saying goodbye? Why wasn’t she hugging her with everything she had, transferring a lifetime of hugs to her in that moment? They’d known this was a possibility. For almost four generations, every girl ever had known this was a possibility. They prepared for it. They made bon voyage cards. They didn’t steal food and try to escape.

“I can’t ignore my duties to everyone else,” Paige told her, though it was mostly automatic, words that had been branded into her brain year after year. 

If Ingrid could leave, why couldn’t she? Why couldn’t all of them?

Death, or something, was the logical answer, but logic was an abstract concept lingering somewhere in the air above them, beyond the roof of the tetriplex, when under that roof Mott was standing right in front of her, almost nose-to-nose, her almondy scent pressing a wave of calm over Paige’s shoulders. Mott’s freckles stood out when she was this close, a constellation of high-melanin stars over the rest of her creamy brown skin. Everything about Mott was dark and warm, like the sun blanketing your skin as it set at the end of a hot, spring day while you sit on the balcony with your feet up and drink cinnamon tea. Paige could see every hair on Mott’s impeccably groomed, thick eyebrows, could trace the shadow down from those eyebrows to the curved tip of her slender nose, just underneath which her normally-loud lips, quiet now and still so Paige could see the straggler freckle on the bottom one, parted ever so slightly to show the edges of her teeth—which Paige suddenly, desperately, inexplicably wanted to lick. To see what they felt like under her tongue, like that would give her access to know what made Mott Mott, the incredible girl whose skin couldn’t contain her confidence, who always seemed to understand everything. It was like if Paige could touch her teeth, gain access to the inside of Mott’s mouth, suddenly she would understand everything about her and be cured of this insatiable wanting that pushed through her veins, her pores, her hair. 

She wanted to kiss Mott. They were here, like they’d left off a few hours ago, and it was like the momentum couldn’t be stopped now; against her better reasoning, she felt her hand reach out to hold Mott’s face, tracing her jawline to her shoulder. 

“Tell me you’ll go,” Mott whispered, leaning her forehead against Paige’s, and Paige realized that she’d been wrong. This was everything she’d ever wanted. She curled her fingers in between Mott’s with one hand, brought the other one up to tentatively touch Mott’s neck, to run her fingers over the three vertebrae connecting her head to her spine. 

“I want to,” Paige whispered back.

“Then do it.”
 
Excerpt from Vessel, forthcoming Spring 2025
Character moodboard for Mott, five images. Clockwise: yellow daisy against yellow background; girl with brown skin, short and wavy hair, and an optimistic smile looking upward; iron-on decal over a corkboard background that reads
Mott, the heretic.
Mott is usually everyone's favorite character. She's sassy, she's fun, she's daring, and she has a whole lot of heart. She's been secretly pining for Paige for a while now, and she's managed to mask her way through this high-control society for her entire life, but now that shit's getting real, she's sort of done. 

Mott's character focuses on this question of whether you really can "just leave" a high-control environment. The short answer is: not really, and the cost is massive. When you leave a high-control environment, you're walking away not just from the things that you hate, but the things you love, too. You can't have both, because they're enmeshed. 

In a high-control environment, you feel trapped. No one has ever really given you a different option before, and there usually are moments of happiness (though I'm not sure that can be said for some extremely bad environments like kidnapping or Children of God). When it's a culture, and you've been immersed in it your entire life, you have no other references. 

For me, it was the feeling of having to please everyone around me. My family loved me, and I knew this, but when I did stuff that deviated from what they wanted for me, I was in trouble. When I said the word "crap" in seventh grade, my mouth was washed out with soap. When I got angry about the way that I was being treated, or my mom was being treated, or my brother was being treated, I got spanked with a wooden spoon or a belt for "talking back." When I was in college and I told my mom that I'd had a religious epiphany at a Quaker meeting and realized that I could believe in pacifism and non-violence without believing that Jesus was the Messiah, and that I felt so much relief in that, I was told, coldly, to not share my beliefs with my brother. 

So as an adult, I spoke up. I spoke out. I cussed, a lot. I tried out new religions, I had my first sip of alcohol when I was 17. I denounced Christianity and decided to stop feeling guilty about not going to church. I took antidepressants. I ate sugar, gluten, dairy --- all the things those closest to me had at some point or another told me not to do. Slowly, I started to walk away, but I always felt this tether that brought me back to the things I'd been taught to value. 
​
Sunflower over black background, petals floating away
The thing about leaving is that at some point, you realize that your value system has completely changed, and you realize that in order to survive, you have to let go of the old one. The cost of staying in and pressing yourself into this tiny box at the edge of your body and pretending like that squashed thing is You is just too high, and you start to realize how miserable you really are in that environment. You start to recognize that your happiness is based on everyone else's happiness, and that even though you try to control every piece of yourself to support their happiness, it's still forever out of your hands. Something tips the scales and soon you find yourself coming up for air because you only realized just then that you were drowning. 

Paige has this sort of experience. But Mott's experience is that of the more secular regular-attenders, the people who weren't anything close to church royalty. Everyone knew that they smoked, or drank, or had tattoos, or were reformed addicts, or went pole dancing, or had gay sex, but it was okay because they were chill and they liked everyone and everyone liked them, and as long as they kept coming to church and asking jesus to be their lord and savior, then they were just sinners like the rest of us. They were performing their surrender, and so long as they practiced humility, kept believing in the same thing as everyone else, it was something of an equalizer. In fact, these were the people who were lifted up as exemplars. In some ways, they had a lower social status because they had allegedly fallen so far that they had to be lifted up even higher than most people just to get their feet back on the ground, and wasn't god so amazingly powerful to be able to do that? Incredible. Awesome. If he can save them, he can save you, you lesser sinner with fewer problems, too. 

People like this weren't particularly threatening to the purist community, because they didn't hold a lot of power. They didn't really sit on boards, or teach classes -- maybe they would act in a play, or sing in the choir, but when it came to making decisions about church power and wealth and influence, they didn't have any say. They were the poster child for how the church was effective, how diverse and inclusive the community was. That was it. 

Heretics will put up with a bunch of low-level mistreatment as long as there are people there they still love. But once you threaten the people they really, truly love, all bets are off. They won't keep their mouths shut about that mistreatment to the general public. They will get out of there and get the people they love out of there, or die trying, and death in high-control groups doesn't look so good to authorities (that is, if the group hasn't already staffed all of the local authorities with its own membership). They're exceptionally loyal and fiercely protective, and they're dangerously honest. 

This is probably why people like Mott so much. She understands the bullshit of the world around her, and makes the best of it while maintaining her healthy dose of imagining what things could be like, or delving into history to see how other people used to live differently. She keeps her judgment at bay, and she's always there to gently encourage Paige to question the things around her. She's a breath of sanity in a world that makes you feel insane. And willing to do anything for Paige, whether she has to burn the whole world down or not.  
I love her, and I'm excited for you to meet her. 
​
And at this point in my life, I'm excited to be her.
]]><![CDATA[The Relief of Surrender]]>Sat, 09 Nov 2024 17:16:11 GMThttps://www.riewrites.org/vessel-blog/the-relief-of-surrenderMy head is a jumble of thoughts right now. Now, more than ever, I feel resolute in my insistence on creating art that resonates with young people. I want my art to create refuge for those who are seeking answers and comfort, and I want it to bring them hope. 

But I also want it to serve as a warning for young readers who haven't been exposed yet to things like The Handmaid's Tale: the way that high-control environments are direct consequences of widespread fear and destruction. I want it to speak to the promises these communities make about delivering us from pain and powerlessness, offering us comfort when no one else can, and also serve as a warning as to the steep price of that comfort.

In times like these, when we feel battered and bruised and exhausted and fucking shit, not this again, I feel like surrendering. I want the comfort that religion used to bring to me, like I describe in my experiences as a young person below. And I think there is something valuable in allowing myself to surrender, but only to a certain extent. 

Right now, I surrender to the reality that this is the dystopic world in which we live, and that our country has chosen to live in this world on purpose. That is inherently, objectively true, and I won't resist it. 

But that's the extent of my surrender. For the rest of it, I will continue to resist. I will continue to make art, to build community, to be the intersectional minority I am, because that experience is a real human experience and cannot be erased. I will continue to be complicated, to exist. 

I will continue to be. 
PictureHands coming out of the water in low lighting in front of large rocks
Surrender means letting go. Sometimes, of everything.
The Matriarch stood tall and quiet, providing a calming presence that Paige echoed while she clutched onto the Pandora. Paige half expected it to burn when she touched it: she was sure that something as sacred as the Pandora could sense her inadequacy, both as a human and the supposed spiritual emblem of her people. She waited for the fiery crawl of sinful guilt she remembered from when she was younger, but the Pandora only felt like a box. 

Maybe the guilt wouldn’t come. Now that she’d made the right choice—to surrender herself to the community—maybe she was vindicated. 

Surrender. A delicious, seductive word that always made Paige feel like she was flying. Surrender was relief; it was the acknowledgment that someone else was in charge, not her. She didn’t have to be the one making the decisions or calling the shots, because the Ancestors had already decided that long ago. New Standard was protected land, home to protected people. The Ancestors, then, were their protectors, gatekeepers of the Afterlands, and all the New Standardites had to do to show worthiness of the gift of neverending life in perfect peace and comfort was follow the rules that the Spared had used to find favor with the Ancestors back during the war. 

She was doing that, she reminded herself. She was following the rules. Keeping the covenant. Earning her place. 

Deep breath in. 

“Are we ready?” said the administrator. 

Deep breath out. 

The administrator didn’t wait for anyone to respond. He wiped his glasses with his shirt and glanced passively at the Procession before waving them along. All Paige had to do was walk straight. Hold the Pandora, not drop it, and walk straight.

And the rising sun and cooler, dewy morning air with the cheering crowd, the energy frantically relieved in the wake of having a new Ritualist who promised to be more dedicated than the one who abandoned them, washed over her a familiar comfort. Paige marched next to the Matriarch in the middle of the Procession, guarded by CSes all around them. The student band led the group, playing the lively patriotic song “Come Light, Healing Light”; the current sitting Council of Elders trailed in a phalanx behind Paige and the Matriarch; bringing up the rear, a group of dancers performed a traveling square dance in time with the music. 

The band played the same song year after year, the audience watching on the sidelines joining in singing. Each year prior to this one, it was the one song that put Paige entirely in her happy place. 

Now, she tried to resist the pleasure flooding her brain that insisted on making her feel like her normal self again. It wanted to make her happy, but she didn’t deserve it. She had doubted. She hadn’t fallen prey to temptation, but it wasn’t because of her own resilience. It was luck that she’d been in the right circumstances. 

But the Statutes were forgiving; they guided you, if you let them. The music, too, was relentless. It washed over her like a shower, the spray of comfort raining a homey heat over her hair and down her face, behind her ears and around her neck. Singing was a hot bubble bath on a cool January night; it was the blissful surrender of anxiety, the security of knowledge of the Truth. Paige sang as they marched down the citizen lined street, one voice melding among the thousands:

“Come light, healing light, come light eternal, 
Shake, shake out of me all that is carnal 
I’ll be a pure light, I’ll lead the way 
I’ll show the Theorists how we behave.”

The dancers marched in step and shook their hands like they were trying to get off something sticky. Like sin. And as if the universe was peering into Paige’s brain, she spotted Mott in the crowd. Her dark mane of tight curls spread out from her head like a delicate brown halo; she watched Paige quietly, a rarity for Mott, but what else was there to do?

Nothing.

Paige tried to avoid Mott’s gaze. Hell, she tried to avoid anyone’s gaze.

She caught sight of Adam toward the front of the crowd, his lips wrinkled in what seemed like disappointment. Paige kept the polite smile on her face, unwavering. At least that was the good thing that had come from al the stressors of her childhood environment: al the times she’d had to go to Meditation after Mama had cleaned her mouth out with soap when Paige had talked back, when Paige had tried to defend unorthodox punishments—she’d had to pretend, to play the part of the obedient, devout daughter then. She’d been expected to keep her mouth shut about the soap thing, just smile and greet their neighbors. Smile and keep sweet. Smile and be polite. And smile.
Excerpt from Vessel, forthcoming Spring 2025
​When I was in youth group service at church in high school, I raised my hands during songs, moved by the power of what I thought was god. I surrendered myself to jesus’s love. I surrendered myself to the will of a legendary being who allegedly created the existence of everything, and whose existence I can’t prove but I must trust at risk of losing my faith, a fate worse than death. Or abuse. Abuse is worth it—valuable, even—in the process of faith, because faith can get you anywhere. Faith can set you free.

Except for me, faith was the thing that chained me. I was accountable to it. Everything I did was in service of a faith I inherited from other people. It was a faith not just given to me, not offered, but mandated to me.

As Paris Paloma so succinctly put it, “it’s not an act of love if you make her.”

This teaching of surrender in Christianity may seem like a relief to some. It did for me, when I was younger. I wanted someone to take control over my life and give me peace, because I was fucking tired. I wanted to surrender to something, anything, that could make my pain better, whether that was Jesus or death or, hell, both.

Eventually I realised that Jesus wasn’t going to do shit, because it was all a setup. Some dude in the sky made a world I didn’t ask for, made me suffer in ways I didn’t ask for, and then had some ego trip telling me that he was the only one I should believe in, then made my ancestors provide blood atonement, then made it so I had to surrender my life to him? And he would somehow make it better? I was surrendering. I was surrendering as hard as I could, and I was still having panic attacks on a regular basis. I still wanted to die to escape it all, because I hadn’t signed up for any of it.

The thing about growing up that way—about being taught the importance of surrender as a means of survival, of being “saved,” rescued from a fate you were destined for without your consent—is that you learn to surrender yourself to other authorities in your life. Church leaders, teachers. Parents. And the surrender doesn’t actually save you. It just gives people control over you.
PictureWriting on a whiteboard. The word “surrender” is circled, with an arrow pointing from it to the phrase, “I have control over all of you.” “All” is underlined.
So I walked away. And it was terrifying, because with relinquishing my faith, I was then alone and without any coping mechanisms. To let go of faith is in itself an act of sheer faith—that you're going to survive without the safety net you've been able to know is there your whole life. It's trust in what you know: that that safety net has had holes in it this whole time, and that no matter how many times people tell you it'll catch you, you know it won't catch you. And when you have a new faith, and don't have a community reinforcing it around you, it's lonely and terrifying. 

But in my case, it was also incredibly worth it. 

I have found so much healing over the years from walking away from my religion. I have recreated the foundation of my sense of belief, of how I see my existence in the world, and I am constantly learning more and shifting. But now I've built in the ability to shift into my foundation, and my sense of self is malleable to be able to handle when I'm unsure or wrong. What I've built on top of it is also a sense of surrender: to the knowledge that I don't have all the answers yet, and that I likely never will, and that I will be wrong many, many times. I've found peace in knowing that there's no such thing as purity, though I'm still trying to unlearn the impulse to clean all of my mistakes in a way that will render me blameless. Peace is now something that I have created for myself, and it isn't something that someone else has created for me. 
​
It's mine. 
​And with that, I am extremely pleased to reveal the cover of this new book!

​Drumroll, please . . . 
Cover for VESSEL: a novel. Image of two lit candles dripping white wax on a girl's shoulder. The girl has medium-toned skin and dark hair, and only her shoulder, neck, and ear are visible. The top of the cover reads,
]]><![CDATA[Vulnerability in High-Control Environments]]>Mon, 28 Oct 2024 03:54:33 GMThttps://www.riewrites.org/vessel-blog/vulnerability-in-high-control-environments
Five images depicting main character, Paige. Clockwise: 1. Girl with pale skin and dark hair in a white dress facing a wall; 2. Young woman with medium-toned skin and dark hair wearing hoop earrings and a dark blouse with flowers; 3. Black box with the words,
Paige, the true believer.
The ritual of making tea calmed her: chamomile leaves in a strainer, hot water, honey, the mug warming her hands; it rooted her in reality. She wasn’t Aunt Felicity, the woman who’d shamed their family as a sexual miscreant, loving some unknown woman in secret; Paige was the heroine who would make up for all of that. She was the one who would forever turn her family from a family who needed to be saved to a family who saved everyone else.
Excerpt from Vessel, forthcoming Spring 2025
Paige, our heroine, is a true believer. 

True believers are people who have bought entirely into their belief system. These are the people who make excuses for all of the terrible things that people who are in their belief community do, because all of those terrible things are in service to the greater good. These are the people who believe so much in the greater good that they are willing to die for it. 

I was that true believer, too.

I grew up Baptist in Fresno, California. Fresno is an interesting place, and quite conservative for California. It's a place with lots of local pride, where there's a simultaneous sense of "we're an awesome city in its own right, who needs those big-city jerks" and "let's install world-class cultural institutions so that we're comparable to Los Angeles." It's a relatively large city--500,000 people during the aughts--with tons of insular communities. Fresno is more than 50% Hispanic/Latinx, and my insular community reflected this: my dad's family is Mexican, my mom's family is Spanish and French, and both of them were raised Catholic. I was raised immersed in my dad's family, everyone of whom spoke fluent English, but who had strongly inherited Mexican-Catholic sensibilities. 

Basically, "Encanto" is my life. Minus the happy ending. 

That environment did a number on me. I grew up with this idea drilled into me that I was a sinner, and that was just by default, and I had to confess how awful I was to Jesus in order to be saved from being burned for eternity when I died. And more than that, it was up to me to prevent my friends from that same fate, and if I didn't, it would be my fault. 

I was taught evangelical recruitment techniques: give the gentle sell, use the particular gifts God has given you to show how much you're so happy that you have Jesus and God in your life, that you have been saved from being the scum you were born as, because as soon as you were born you sinned. You sinned with your impure thoughts that Jesus saw on a regular basis on a giant screen in Heaven at the pearly gates, judging you for whenever you got there, and you had to hope that your faith was good enough during your life on Earth, that you had asked to be saved enough times that you wouldn't be rejected right then and there for that one time you masturbated in secret and didn't ask for forgiveness. 

Because that's what religion was in my community: a lifetime of servitude to the Lord. A lifetime of knowing the right things to say, of giving platitudes for everything, of feeling obligated to share every compulsion I had (when I got my first kiss, I felt like I had to sit both of my parents down separately and admit it to them, guilt and delight warring equally for space in my brain). A lifetime of prioritizing work and family and putting friends and fun at the bottom of your list. And when combined with Latin culture, it meant no space for privacy. Total vulnerability. That was what faith meant. 

Pleasure wasn't part of that. It was something to hide.
ON THE STRENGTH OF THE MIND
An excerpt from the Statutes of Equality

Take notice, Friend, how your body responds to your mind. They are both one and the same and separate from each other, and you have control over them both. Think, and you shall do; act, and you shan’t think. 

And it is because we control our minds that we provide this static control over ourselves. When our bodies respond to instinct we stop them and remind ourselves that instinct is what brought us war. We separate individual desire from what is best for the Whole. 

We give our selves to each other, Friend. And here I tell you that you have the divine power to say no. When your body tells you it would prefer not to wake up, you command it to rise; when it tells you it would rather love another of the same sex, you remind it that is not wise. The best method for survival is logic and calculation—and the love that supports it. That love is selfless and kind. The pleasure of selfishness is irrelevant and must be ignored.

Take that pleasure and push it away. Grind it under the dirt beneath your feet and dust it with the ash settled in the Earth’s ruins. For pleasure is not what moves us along; pleasure is what keeps us behind.
Excerpt from Vessel, forthcoming Spring 2025
I started writing Paige in 2011, when I was 21 years old. At the time, Mott was a boy. The book was called Ritual Girl, and I published it on FictionPress to much success (133 reviews! 43 users following the story! It was glorious), and you're welcome for that link, because not many people in my current life have seen it. At that time in my life, I thought I was very straight--because that was what I had been trained to believe about myself. That was the narrow frame of existence I had been taught was available to me throughout my childhood. 

Things were rough at home, and I existed in a constant state of anxiety, knowing that I was a sinner and constantly needed to try to get a clean slate, apologizing over and over for my sins: fighting with my brother, writing fanfiction instead of doing my Latin homework, talking back at things I found unfair. 

I started to have panic attacks. When I was in high school and I was overwhelmed with my lack of living up to expectations, I started to beat my legs with the heels of my dance shoes, bruises blending in with the bruises I had all over my knees constantly from dance anyway. I was told to not tell my friends about it, because they might tell their parents and it was a "family matter." We could talk about it within our family, with our grandparents, but they did nothing. They prayed for us. And prayed for us the next time it happened. And the next time. And the next time. 

It did nothing. I was still miserable. If anything, I was even more miserable than before. 

This clip from the reboot series "One Day at a Time" perfectly illustrates how mental health was treated in my family. Penelope (Justina Machado) says, "I'm Cuban! You know, we don't really do therapy," and her new friend Jill (Haneefah Wood) says, "In my family, the only therapist we're allowed to talk to was Jesus. And he must be booked up because he has not returned my calls." 

I sneaked into therapy in high school. Sneaked into it again in college. And when I finally started to deconstruct my religion, my family culture, how messed up it wall was, and I wanted to start therapy, I was told that therapy was just a scam, someone who would charge them for me to complain to them. 

So when you're experiencing anomalies in what you're "supposed" to live like, and you don't, you're not satisfied, and it's your fault that you're not just grateful that you have food and shelter and people who profess to love you, and you ask Jesus over and over again for help and you ask family for help and the only help that comes is hollow and empty, you're alone. Talking about your struggles with other people isn't an available option. In my case, it made my suicidal ideation more intense. 

For Paige, it makes her feel like the only way out is to die. She feels like she has to make up for her Aunt Felicity, who was labeled a "Theorist" (essentially, an apostate) whose sin was loving another woman--
Aunt Felicity seemed like a quiet woman in the photo, unlikely to make the trouble that she did. Her thick, black hair was brushed straight into a neat ponytail, the collar on her impressive Council-Medic shirt pressed to perfection. She couldn’t have been much older than Papa, maybe a year or two. Not a few weeks before she was cleansed, probably. She was beautiful and her smile glowed brightly; she’d heard whispers—from when people gossiped but thought no one was listening, but never from Papa himself—that she was kind and friendly and that no one saw her cleansing coming. ​
Excerpt from Vessel, forthcoming Spring 2025
--and was "cleansed" (burned at the stake, a la Joan of Arc) for it. 

So when Paige starts feeling these dangerous signs of pleasure when interacting with her best friend, Mott, who is also a girl, the only way out seems to be to die with honor: to be sacrificed before anyone can find her out. 

This is what it's like to live with the pressure of a religion with a narrow focus on how life should be lived. This is what it's like to live in a community that encourages you to keep quiet with people outside of your community. Eventually, the people who love you--whom you love--train you to believe that the deviation in how you experience life is unacceptable and should be corrected--love the sinner, hate the sin. 
Six pink boxes under the heading
Cults aren't always Jonestown or Heaven's Gate: sometimes it's your own family. 


When you are in a community where the people who love you the most tell you to keep your pain away from your closest friends, that trained professionals are just out to get your money and would never understand, it makes the community ripe for abusive behaviors. 

This was my experience of what Tia Levings, author of A Well-Trained Wife, describes in her memoir: a "cult without walls." In a podcast interview, Levings reflects on her experience of falling deeper and deeper into high-control religion, which isn't so much a single church but rather a continuum of one religion, which is how people find themselves in cultlike (more specifically, high-control) environments. 

I wanted to tell the story of a true believer in fiction for the modern era. George Orwell's 1984 obviously is a hallmark of cults in fiction, but not a whole lot of that exists for YA readers today. There are plenty of books about dystopian rebellion, but those tend to be about main characters who are already hesitant about the system. Paige is a character who is completely bought into this system, who believes that this will be her salvation, who can't fathom other ways of being. She is willing to stuff parts of herself down so that the system can continue, believing that she and she alone is the thing that is wrong with it. There's a strong element of self-gaslighting when you're in a high-control environment like this, and I hope that readers can relate to Paige's journey and find their own empowerment out of it. 
Image sources

Paige Types of Cults
]]><![CDATA[Human sacrifice, cults, and chosen ones (plus Joan of Arc)]]>Sun, 04 Aug 2024 14:05:56 GMThttps://www.riewrites.org/vessel-blog/human-sacrifice-cults-and-chosen-ones-plus-joan-of-arc

The Community

A handwritten note

They gather in rows and they gather in lines. Equidistant and quick, one at a time, ants with a task under the direction of their queen. They start with the oldest, who steps into the pyramid, offers his body so they'll care for him. He walks in, his light goes out. Eyes roll back as the body slumps in the chair, two arms, ten fingers, one head. He thought the fire would lift him up but he falls into a pile of ashes. The second-oldest steps up next, offers her body, and so on, and so forth, systematic, machines. Later, the young will collect the ashes, will turn the ash into feed for the crops. And isn't this how community should be, the young caring for the old, the old making room for the young? They start the fire and the bodies recycle, the bodies burn. So long, thirty-nine billion nerves in each of the hundred-and-six separate forms; together burn two hundred twelve arms; together, two hundred twelve legs. The skin starts to flay and the young work swiftly to clean up—ashes collected, floor swept, systematic, machines. Isn't this how community should be?
Excerpt from Vessel, forthcoming Spring 2025

​Cults, human sacrifice, & chosen ones

This particular passage above is one of my favorites from the entirety of Vessel. It's creepy and has a pushing rhythm to it, and when you read it out loud and emphasize the consonants, there's something about it that feels awful and metallic. 

The book features my spin on a post-apocalyptic ritual sacrifice. Much of the lore in this book is a mishmash of traditions; this ritual, known as "the Ascension," is an annual mass human sacrifice that systematically kills every single citizen of the age of 65 and turns their bodies into something that cleans the post-nuclear air (don't worry, we're not doing Soylent Green here). Our heroine, Paige, wants to volunteer as New Standard's sacrifice, known as the Ritualist, and even though the narrative of the Ascension is shrouded in veiled puritanesque language, she understands on some level that she'll die in the process. 
The interesting thing about ritualized human sacrifice--as much as we've seen it throughout history--is that it's many times voluntary. Hell, Aztec parents even offered their own children to be sacrificed (though I imagine the children themselves weren't exactly volunteering: the linked article describes a ritual in which children were sacrificed so that they would cry and their tears would be an offering to some god who made it rain. Which--I mean, couldn't you just threaten to kill them and then use those tears? And then not kill them? Idk, I guess I'm too modern). 

Much of the imagery I use in this book, as far as ritualistic violence goes, is fire-based. There are a few reasons for this: one, my first concept of people being burned alive was the story of Joan of Arc, which I learned about from the "Bowser's Library" mini-program attached to the "Mario's Time Machine" PC game in the '90s. (I am still looking for a copy of this mini-program, so if you find one, hmu.) The imagery of Joan of Arc, her virginal purity, and the hopeful tragedy of a young girl who had immense value but then was centered and sacrificed and martyred--all of this was distressingly poetic to me as a child who had grown up in a very conservative evangelical Baptist community in central California. But I also grew up on a steady diet of witch books, and you can sure as hell bet that witch burnings had a morbid attachment in my brain. There was something romantic about the Salem Witch Trials, I imagined. Something that blended with chosen-one narratives and turned the victims into heroes. But I never really thought much about the reality of death by burning and its horrific details of until I got a few drafts into this book. 
Painting of ​St Joan of Arc being burned at the stake for heresy, May 30, 1431.Picture
​St Joan of Arc being burned at the stake for heresy, May 30, 1431. I really wish I knew who the artist was, so if someone knows, please tell me. Source: Encyclopedia Brittanica.
A lot of chosen-one narratives are heroes who don't decide to be heroes. Jonas in The Giver is selected because he has some special ability he's born with. Harry Potter was chosen because he happened to be in the right place at the right time. Anakin Skywalker was in his position thanks to destiny, Buffy Summers is called to be the Slayer, Tris Prior is born 100% divergent, Ash Ketchum is destined to restore balance to the world. There is, of course, something beautiful about being selected out of the masses of thousands (if not five possible Gryffindors) and being told that you are important and special and that the universe rests on your shoulders, etc. But for me, chosen-one narratives are best when there's no destiny involved. 

Katniss Everdeen is one such heroine: she volunteers for the Hunger Games purely to spare her little sister. She does this compulsively and knowing that there's a very good chance that she'll lose. There's no prophecy, only late (late late late)-stage capitalism and autocracy. Katniss walks herself into a voluntary human sacrifice via her acceptance of the status quo and her sheer will to survive. 

Vessel's main character, Paige, is in some ways the opposite of Katniss. Paige is someone who has grown up in this cult and has completely bought into her religious beliefs, much like I did when I was just a bit younger than her. I remember believing in magic, in witches, in that blurry line between faith and reality; at eleven, I genuinely believed that I could control the weather. Until I was fifteen or sixteen, I imagined that I could see the fabric between this world and the next, because my belief was authentic and pure and full of complete trust. The thing that pulled me out of my siloed belief system was learning about other cultures and traditions--in particular, being in a mythology class that taught us about other flood stories. And then, all I wanted to do was find the comparisons between what I grew up being told was fact and finding comparable stories from other cultures. 

Paige hasn't gotten to that point in her life, mostly because she exists in a community that is the only community around. Her desire to be the Ritualist stems from her genuine desire to be the thing that purifies her community, but also as a welcome relief to her palpable fear of having to marry a dude, since she is very very gay. It might sound dramatic, but I wanted to touch on this depressing reality of the queer experience. Sometimes, the pressure of an oppressive, heteronormative world presses against the truth you know in your body--that no matter what you do, you will never be able to live honestly and you'll be stuck in the exhausting daily struggle of denying yourself for the rest of your life, and you will never belong--such that the only relief is simply choosing to no longer exist. 

​I didn't come out until after I was already married. I'm lucky, in a lot of ways, that I'm bi: I found acceptance from my (male) spouse, and ultimately didn't feel like I had to get divorced. I earnestly hope that this book finds its way to some kid struggling with feeling like they have to give themselves up, and I want them to know that, at the end of the day, they can look at the philosophy they were born into and burn it all down. ​​
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