About these videos

I created these short videos to explore questions I had about cults. Why do people join? How do cults lure people in? Each video poses answers, followed by excerpts from my novel The Children of the Children. More videos are coming soon. I suggest watching them in the order shown on the dropdown menu.

I come at this from a place of pain. Several members of my family were in a cult. For years, the rest of my family struggled to understand and to keep the lines of communication open. Gradually, all of my loved ones made their way out, but it was an incredibly difficult journey. I hope the scenery and music I chose for the videos will offset the difficulty of the subject.

I wrote The Children of the Children because fiction allowed me to get inside the heads of my characters, and only by getting inside someone's head can you understand. Through writing, research, and observing the world around me, including the last 10 years of American politics, I've come to understand that "groupthink," a phrase coined over 70 years ago after the publication of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, is all around us. Everyone is susceptible to cult-like thinking.

The Children of the Children is available in Kindle on Amazon and in paperback and audiobook at various outlets. Though inspired by real events, the story and characters are fictitious.  

July 2026