Dear Reader,

Mayan Ruins began as a lark—a private game between new lovers. One of us enjoyed reading short, sexy stories; the other enjoyed writing them. It started with a simple prompt (the title of the book) and an expectation that what followed would be a Literotica-style beach read: playful, titillating, unserious.

It did not stay there.

What began as a bit of erotic mischief became, almost despite myself, a deeper exploration of human complexity, vulnerability, trauma, memory, faith, power, and the ways private bodies become public battlegrounds. The book still has enough sex in it to make me uncomfortable discussing it with my closest friends and family. But sex, in the end, was never the whole subject. It was the doorway.

Writing a feminist story as a man meant leaning into contradiction rather than sanding it away. Maya’s biological mother was a Shia cleric who wore a hijab and preached fundamentalist gender roles in a society that had liberalized gender rights. On the surface, she may look, to American eyes, like a recidivistic symbol of female submission. But beneath that surface is a rebel: a woman of faith, conviction, intellect, and courage who refused to bow before an authoritarian regime that tried and failed to break her.

Maya herself is another contradiction. She is unapologetically sexual, but not reducible to sexuality. She is wounded, but not fragile. She is political, but not ideological. She refuses to be contained by the expectations of men, family, religion, or state, even when the state tries to bend her to its will.

When I began writing in the summer of 2023, America was still reeling from the Dobbs Supreme Court decision, which overturned nearly fifty years of constitutional protection for abortion rights. I didn’t view myself as writing a political book, but I wanted a contemporary backdrop for the state’s attack on Maya, and I did not have to invent one. It was already around us.

In the years since Dobbs, the abstractions have become flesh. Legal language—“exceptions,” “medical necessity,” “fetal cardiac activity,” “life of the mother”—has migrated from court opinions into emergency rooms. Women have been sent home to get sicker before doctors felt legally safe enough to intervene. Patients have been forced to travel out of state while miscarrying, septic, terrified, or grieving. Families have watched medical decisions become legal calculations. Doctors have had to ask not only, “What does this patient need?” but also, “What might a prosecutor say later?”

In 2022, Amber Thurman, a 28-year-old nursing assistant and the mother of a six-year-old son, died in a suburban Atlanta hospital. She had taken abortion pills, legally obtained out of state, and developed a rare complication. The treatment was a routine procedure, but Georgia’s new ban had made that procedure legally perilous, and she waited some twenty hours for it. Georgia’s own maternal mortality review committee later ruled her death preventable. The committee used the same word—preventable–—for Candi Miller, a 41-year-old Georgia mother whose existing illnesses meant another pregnancy could kill her, and who, her family said, never went to a doctor at all after self-managing the abortion because she was afraid of the law.

In Texas, where state lawmakers got a head start on Dobbs with public incentives to sue doctors and anyone else who “aided and abetted” an abortion, Josseli Barnica miscarried at seventeen weeks and waited some forty hours for care while doctors hesitated over a fetus that still had a heartbeat. She died of the infection that followed. Nevaeh Crain was eighteen, and six months pregnant, when she developed sepsis during a miscarriage, her symptoms beginning on the morning of her own baby shower. Two emergency rooms turned her away; at the third, staff made her wait through two ultrasounds to “confirm fetal demise” before anyone would treat her. She had planned to name her daughter Lillian. They are buried together.

And in February 2025, Adriana Smith, a 30-year-old nurse and mother in Georgia, suffered catastrophic blood clots in her brain and was declared brain dead at around nine weeks pregnant. Her family was told she could not be allowed to die, because the fetus had a heartbeat and the law required her body to be kept running. She was kept on life support for months. Her mother called it torture.

The numbers behind the names are not subtle. In Texas, ground zero for the abortion wars, the rate of maternal deaths in the state rose 33% between 2019 and 2023 even as the national rate fell by 7.5%. Researchers found a sharp rise in sepsis among women losing pregnancies in the second trimester. Infant deaths in Texas climbed about 13% following its ban, and deaths from congenital anomalies, the conditions that force many families into the hardest decision of their lives, rose by nearly 23%. A study in JAMA counted hundreds of excess infant deaths across the states that enacted bans, with Black infants dying at the highest rates.

These are not hypotheticals. They are not culture-war talking points. They are human beings whose bodies became the place where law, medicine, religion, politics, fear, and institutional self-protection collided.

And the collision has not stopped at abortion. Dobbs did not create America’s divisions, but it revealed how brittle many of our shared assumptions had become. It exposed the gap between slogans and suffering, between abstract moral certainty and embodied human consequence. It showed how quickly rights can become contingent, how easily women’s pain can be minimized, and how often power speaks in the language of protection while demanding obedience.

Around the same time, the larger civic fabric continued to fray and fracture. White supremacy, Christian nationalism, misogyny, and xenophobia—forces some of us imagined had been pushed to the margins—began speaking more openly, more confidently, and from the center of political life. Social media, mobile devices, and now AI have replaced the local conversations that held civic society together with algorithmic optimizations that reward polarization. Complexity is punished. Certainty is rewarded. Outrage travels faster than grief. The human being on the other side of an argument becomes a symbol, then a caricature, then an enemy.

Populism thrives on that flattening. It takes the complexity of human life and compresses it into a chant, a meme, a purity test, a villain. It tells us who deserves sympathy and who does not. It trains us to look at other people’s suffering only long enough to decide whether it helps our side.

Mayan Ruins was my attempt to resist that flattening.

I did not write it to deliver a sermon. I did not write it to prove that I was one of the good men, or to claim ownership of experiences that are not mine. I did not write it to judge women, believers, conservatives, liberals, immigrants, parents, victims, perpetrators, or the people who survive by becoming harder than they wanted to be. The world has more than enough judgment already. You don’t need mine.

I wrote it to understand, to see the world through eyes very different from my own.

To sit, for a while, inside the contradictions that make moral certainty difficult. To imagine what it might feel like to be a woman whose sexuality is both power and wound. To be a mother whose faith is inseparable from rebellion. To be a teenage girl whose body becomes evidence. To be a man who wants to protect someone and discovers that protection can become another form of control. To be a person whose private pain is dragged into public spectacle and forced to serve someone else’s narrative.

In a time of hyper-partisanship, that kind of imaginative work can sound naïve. Maybe even indulgent. But I think we are starving for it. Not because empathy solves everything. It does not. Not because seeing through another person’s eyes means surrendering judgment. It does not. But because judgment without imagination becomes cruelty. Politics without human particularity becomes machinery. And art, at its best, can slow us down long enough to notice what our slogans erase.

A painter brings something from outside the canvas onto it, creating a scene of breathtaking complexity from a blank slate. She conjures perspective, light, motion, atmosphere. She gives the viewer a way to see.

A sculptor begins differently. She starts with a block of wood or stone and removes what she must, leaving the viewer with the sense that there is more beneath the surface than what has been exposed. A sculpture invites the viewer to move around it, to bring their own angle, their own shadow, their own history. It invites touch, and in return, it touches back.

As a first-time novelist, I found myself distrustful of the omniscient narrator who explains too much, interprets too much, judges too eagerly on the reader’s behalf, adds perspective the way a painter does with her brush. There is no perfect angle from which to project the full complexity of a human life onto a flat surface. So I tried to carve instead. To reveal enough to learn, and to leave enough hidden to inspire curiosity. To let the reader walk around the figures and feel where their own sympathies shifted.

I chose the chisel over the paintbrush.

And I hope, in reading Mayan Ruins, you feel invited not to agree with every character, or forgive every act, or resolve every contradiction—but to see.

-Brandon