New book reveals shocking details of secret Mormon ceremony featuring violent vows
Confessions of a Once Upon a Time Mormon Girl
Release date June 15, 2026
Hypatia Press is proud to announce the release of Confessions of a Once Upon a Time Mormon Girl by Maureen Clark, a deeply personal memoir that confronts the psychological and emotional toll of growing up and marrying within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Like countless young Mormon couples before them, Jon and Maureen prepared to begin their life together with a sacred temple wedding. But first came the Endowment Ceremony—a preparatory ritual that shocks the young bride with its graphic covenants. Participants must swear extreme penalties for revealing the ceremony’s secrets, including having their throats slit or being disemboweled. Despite the horrifying introduction to sacred space, the wedding proceeds, and Maureen steps into married life carrying the weight of those promises. Thirty years later, when Jon announces he is leaving the Church, long-repressed trauma surges to the surface. As Maureen grapples with her own fading faith, she confronts how the early covenants shaped her marriage, her body, and her sense of self in a religious institution that grows increasingly conservative. What began as a storybook temple wedding became the starting point for a profound examination of belief, control, trauma, and the quiet courage required to question everything you were taught to hold sacred. Written with raw honesty and emotional clarity, Confessions of a Once Upon a Time Mormon Girl offers an insider’s view of the personal costs of high-demand religion. It is a story of youthful devotion, marital strain, institutional rigidity, and the hard-won freedom of reclaiming one’s own life and voice.
About the Author: Maureen Clark is a writer and poet whose work has been recognized by the Association of Mormon Letters and others. Her previous books include poetry collections that explore memory, place, and the human spirit. Confessions of a Once Upon a Time Mormon Girl is her unflinching memoir—a testament to the resilience required to leave the faith of one’s youth while honoring the complexity of that journey. Confessions of a Once Upon a Time Mormon Girl will soon be available in paperback and ebook from major retailers including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and more.
For press inquiries, review copies, or author interviews, contact Hypatia Press commissioning editor David G. McAfee at David@DavidGMcAfee.com. Hypatia Press, founded in 2017, publishes quality secular, irreligious, and freethought works that prioritize reason, humanism, and personal truth.
A Clinician's Poetic Reckoning with the Monsters of Modern Medicine
04/25/25 – If you’ve ever been dismissed, misdiagnosed, or gaslit by a medical professional, you know the desperate ache for something—anything—that resembles a prayer. Not a religious one, but something just as sacred: a secular prayer—a plea, a whisper, a moment of silent hope uttered in sterile rooms and sleepless nights. It’s the kind of prayer born not of dogma, but of desperation, and it is the beating heart of Kateland Kelly’s debut book, The Secular Prayers of Medicine: Stories from the Frontlines published by Hypatia Press.
Wholly human, The Secular Prayers of Medicine offers an unflinching look at the invisible rituals and quiet agonies of American healthcare, as seen through the eyes of a clinician who has stood on both sides of the diagnostic divide. With lyricism and clarity, Kelly reveals the monsters that lurk in the gaps between symptoms and belief—between what a patient feels and what a doctor sees.
Drawn from her work in oncology, emergency medicine, and primary care, these deeply personal stories are interwoven with Kelly’s own journey from misdiagnosed patient to certified Physician Assistant. Her lived experience of chronic pain and systemic dismissal gives voice to the many patients who have been silenced or sidelined. Layered with moments of medical history and reflections on institutional failure, the book sheds light on the darker corners of the American healthcare system—particularly the epidemic of medical gaslighting.
Through it all, Kelly returns to the quiet power of the secular prayer: a sacred expression of human resilience in a world that too often forgets how to listen. Whether uttered by a patient hoping to be seen, or a provider hoping to help, these moments carry the weight of both vulnerability and truth.
The Secular Prayers of Medicine is a call to consciousness—for providers, patients, and policymakers alike. It asks us to see medicine not just as a science, but as a relationship. And it reminds us that we are all, in one way or another, only a diagnosis away from our own reckoning.
About the Author: Kateland Kelly was born with a cardiac deformity and spent much of her life slipping through the cracks of the medical system—misdiagnosed, misunderstood, and too often unheard. Her experiences propelled her to become a Physician Assistant, determined to embody the clinician she never had. Ten years into her career, a devastating car accident reignited her own diagnostic nightmare, even as she worked tirelessly to ease the suffering of others. The Secular Prayers of Medicine is her first published work—a searing, soulful meditation on illness, advocacy, and what it means to truly bear witness.
For press-related questions, contact Hypatia Press commissioning editor David G. McAfee: David@DavidGMcAfee.com
Hypatia Press releases dystopian novel that merges religion and government!
Los Angeles --- 08/15 --- Hypatia Press, founded in 2017 to publish secular and irreligious works, is proud to announce the newest book to its growing lineup: Theocrat, which releases Aug. 15 and is available now.
Theocrat, written by Hayden Hart, tells a riveting story of a protagonist faced with the loss of his faith, in a world where faith means absolutely everything. The journey that comes next is filled with intrigue, murder, and manipulation, and the reader is left wanting much more.
Here’s the description:
The people of Visryan, a global theocratic superpower, lead lives unencumbered by the fear of death. Vexrus, the deity ruling over them, offers a simple deal to his followers: serve the state in your earthly life, and be rewarded in the next. One’s afterlife status can even be tracked online.
When his friend and co-worker is executed for heresy and possessing banned materials, Marlow Wilson, a faithful bureaucrat working for the Department of Public Spending, investigates, hoping that exposing misconduct will yield afterlife credit.
The banned materials, however, call his once-unwavering faith into question, forcing him to reevaluate many of the State institutions he once held sacred. Without god, many aspects of society that would normally be considered necessary to further the noble goal of helping the masses enter eternity, become sinister.
About the author:
Hayden Hart studied English, Creative Writing, and Communications at Mercer University, and was a finalist for the 2020 Agnes Scott Writer's Festival Contest and other writing competitions. He enjoys speculative and dystopian fiction, which allows him to play with imaginative social structures and political or cultural systems.
For questions about the book or to contact the author, email David@DavidGMcAfee.com