SASS Newsletter: June Edition

The Pride edition.

Author

Anna Burke
June 17, 2025

In the June edition of SASS we’ll be discussing AI, a news roundup, political actions you can take in your community, and marketing tips.

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.

Ursula K. LeGuin

Pride month is upon us, and however you celebrate, we hope you’re finding time for some personal joy. What does Pride look like for you in these difficult times? Please share your experiences on our Facebook group, Bluesky, or Instagram, or join us for the following virtual sessions:

  • Weekend protest recap/detox with Kris Bryant Wednesday 6/18 at 7:30 Central/8:30PM Eastern

  • Writing sprints with Kris Bryant

  • Coffee chat with Anna Burke Tuesdays at 10am ET

    • 6/24 Topic: Pride celebrations big and small

    • 7/1 Topic: Our favorite books

    • 7/8 Topic: Sapphic books that should be movies

    • 7/15 Topic: Finding queer joy

Links to join these sessions can be found in our Facebook Group for security purposes.

News Roundup

Terrible things are happening outside. At any time of night or day, poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes.  Families are torn apart; men, women, and children are separated.  Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared.  

Anne Frank

Mark Twain once said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.”

It’s been a tough few weeks watching as adults and children are being picked up for deportation, some of them taken from courthouses where they were dutifully attending required immigration hearings. 

Court decisions on a range of issues bring us joy one second only to have our hopes dashed the next.

But amidst all of this, there are signs of hope. 

Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia is back in the U.S. from El Salvador and his attorneys are working hard to fight the charges against him. 

And on Saturday, millions of people in the U.S. and abroad gathered in major cities and small towns to protest on No Kings Day while the sparse attendance at Trump’s military parade completed the picture. Even the soldiers marching couldn’t show much enthusiasm. Their plodding steps looked more like a funeral march than a celebration.

On the book front, the judicial situation is a disappointing mixture of victory and defeat. First the bad news. The Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which covers the deep red Southern states, ruled in a 10-7 decision that the government can restrict access to books in public libraries simply because it dislikes or disagrees with their content. This decision overturned the Court’s 1995 ruling that had allowed challenges to book removals. We’ll see if this case goes up to SCOTUS and what they do with it, likely next year.

Speaking of SCOTUS, there’s a case pending that will likely be decided this month brought by parents seeking the right to opt their children out of using certain books in schools on religious grounds. This is an extremely concerning case since the Court has been very willing to uphold the rights of people making all kinds of demands based on religious belief.

The good news comes from Iowa and Colorado, where a court temporarily blocked enforcement of an Iowa law prohibiting school libraries and classrooms from carrying books that depict sex acts and a federal judge ordered a Colorado school district to return 19 banned books to school library shelves after the district removed them for inappropriate content. The district initially defied the court order, but the judge has now denied the district’s request to end the legal proceedings and maintained the order to return the books. 

Let’s just hope that the good news stays good.  

Finally, these are the states that have passed some form of anti-book banning laws: Illinois, California, Colorado, Minnesota, Maryland and Vermont.

—by Cindy Rizzo

A Conversation with Jae and Tara Scott

Tara Scott and Jae have an important conversation about AI, Amazon, and how both authors and readers can navigate the uncertainty affecting the sapphic lit community.

Resources Mentioned

Artisanal Intelligence

I am an author. I am also a technologist actively working on AI that writes better software and essays than I could when I left university. Already, my first job, writing tests for a software product, no longer exists. Why, then, do I continue to work in the AI space, and how do I think about both the tremendous potential of AI and the very real harm it has already caused? In tech spaces, if you’re not working on AI, you’re at best a relic; at worst you’re next in line for layoffs. But in certain writing spaces, even mentioning AI in a neutral or positive light is likely to get you censured. But AI is here to stay, and once the hype dies down, the question remains whether we can address our fears and find cause for hope. 

Every technological advancement, from air-conditioners to mobile phones, has always been a double-edged sword. Maps navigation changed my life. I grew up in Saudi Arabia when women weren’t allowed to drive. It meant that when I finally learned the skill, as an adult, I was nervous and terrified of getting lost, until I realized that I would just be rerouted if I missed an exit. But Maps navigation also enabled stalkers. Grindr brought gays together, but it also made them a target. AI is just a tool, like any other, and in the wrong hands, or with the wrong goals, a weapon. 

I’ll go into some of the fears people, especially authors and artists, have about AI, how real they are, and what we might do about them. 

Fear 1: AI will exploit us. 

Yes. It’s already doing that. Creative work is being slurped up to train models and the old systems of managing copyright simply can’t keep up with the scale. When even Getty Images has found it “extraordinarily expensive” to handle even one copyright battle with Stability AI, what hope do individual creators have? More copyright cases crop up every day around the world, but even if artists win, it’s almost impossible to undo the data slurping that’s already happened. AI is fantastic at learning, and terrible at unlearning. 

What can we do? Hiding your work behind logins may protect you from randomly being absorbed into AI models that scan the internet, but it doesn’t keep the underlying platform from using your data however they say in the Terms of Service. Remember when Cambridge Analytica mined 87 million Facebook users’ data? Even if Amazon doesn’t sell your novel to train ChatGPT, they may still use your data to train their own in-house models to improve the Amazon experience.

We also can’t protect our fanfic with copyright, because fanfic is already in a copyright grey area with the canon work. We can file trademarks on our names, character names and titles, as the Tolkien estate has done with ‘Tolkien’ or Enid Blyton with ‘The Famous Five.’ The trademark then allows us to sue for legal infringement or license the use of the trademark. But that still puts the burden on the person suing, and doesn’t account for the global nature of the problem and how hard it is to hold foreign companies accountable to one country’s local laws.

Which takes me to another option – giving AI your data, but on your terms. The desperate need that AI companies have for your data actually puts you in a position of some power. A voice actor I met recently works for ElevenLabs, an Audible competitor that has a pretty good AI voice-clone. She said that voice acting used to be a very laborious and precarious gig, since people always went back to the same famous voices. But after an hour of reading The Great Gatsby, she now has a steady stream of passive income whenever ElevenLabs customers listen to audiobooks in her voice. She asked me to try her AI-voice out for one of my books. 

Even as I see many examples of AI-powered exploitation, I see opportunities too. I see foreign-language works getting new audiences thanks to AI-powered translation (with human checks). A completely non-technical friend of mine just started her own company, leveraging AI to help women practice high-stakes workplace conversations. The barrier for entry for new ideas hasn’t just been lowered, it’s crumbled. And that’s glorious.

Fear 2: AI will surpass us.

In some ways, yes. AI is already better at writing code than I ever was. And having AI transcribe our meetings at work has been transformative. Gone are the days of asking the only woman in the meeting to take notes! Moreover, AI is actually better at taking notes and transcribing conversations than most humans, and is spectacular at summarizing large swathes of dense academic or technical writing.

But surely it’s different when it comes to the creative pursuits? This is a plot point in my most recent novel, Algorithms of Betrayal, a story about five people laid off from an AI company who decide to sabotage the machine-learning model that stole their jobs by poisoning it with erotic fanfiction. 

Can AI make creative leaps? Yes, but in limited ways, especially when those creative leaps are commonly known. We call them tropes and cliches for a reason. AI models are probabilistic and predictive, so they give you the most likely next word in the sentence you’re writing, and the most likely next sentence or paragraph to the one you gave it. The result is same-samey prose that you might find your eyes glazing over. 

AI will be a better editor than humans soon, if it isn’t already. Publishers are probably already using AI to edit and translate, given how little money there is in the industry to pay humans. I asked Gemini to edit a sentence, and here’s how it did:

It’s not bad. It picked up on the passive voice and nounification, the length and complexity, and made the sentence better. But a true student of Joe Moran would probably have gone further and rewritten it to “People won’t accept new technologies unless they know what’s in it for them.” Ultimately, as authors, we will differentiate ourselves from AI by our craft, our unique voice, our difference from what’s expected. When you read an author like Arundhati Roy, you encounter sentences like “Littledemons were mudbrown in Airport-Fairy frocks with forehead bumps that might turn into horns” that aren’t likely to show up in an AI-generated text unless it’s hallucinating badly. AI can be a great editor, and I’m hoping it will tell me which phrases I have a tendency to overuse, but I’m not expecting it to win the Booker Prize any time soon. 

As authors and artists, we focus so much on the output of craft, e.g. the novel, that we sometimes forget that the craft is the point. Through craft, we connect with ourselves and others on a deeper level, through what the Japanese call shokunin katagi, or the artisanal spirit, which is not just about skill, but about joy, novelty, and music. I think we should expect that readers will seek out the crafted, the unique, and the imperfect, just as most of us would much rather eat a freshly-cooked meal rather than microwaved cup-noodles.

Fear 3: AI will replace us.

Temporarily, maybe. There are great articles on which jobs AI is likely to take first, but the field is changing rapidly so it’s hard to tell how those predictions will pan out. Right now AI can’t do any of the tedious jobs I would like it to do: my taxes, for instance. It can’t even add properly. That said, several entry-level jobs are disappearing fast. That includes a lot of jobs aspiring writers used to take to pay the rent while they worked on their creative projects: freelance writing, copywriting, journalism, marketing, etc. The train station near my house is plastered with ads that demand we stop hiring humans.

There’s good reason to feel angry; our expensive education systems have taught us skills that won’t get us jobs, and we’re being outsmarted and outpaced by an abstract gadget that can occasionally be frighteningly disobedient. But that’s precisely why I, who was considering retirement, am still at work; because both the potential and peril involved in AI are too high to abdicate my agency. I work on softening AI’s sharp edges as my job, and on educating and empowering others about technology through my fiction.

But when I think about the jobs that aren’t going away, I feel hope. In just the last week, I've interacted with cooks, massage therapists, carers, painters, professional athletes, personal trainers, music teachers and playwrights. If anything, there seems to be a real hunger for in-person human connection, for art that isn’t transactional and distant but immediate and intimate. Maybe beyond the outrage and after the grief, there’s a little room for wonder and curiosity. A friend of mine describes his journey as going from yelling at AIs to get off his lawn to gleefully playing with them, using them to write D&D adventures, brainstorm plot holes, inspire his stories and even to learn Japanese. 

The key difference is one of mindset: rather than thinking of AI as a threat, he thinks of it as a partner, or, as Ethan Mollick calls it, a co-intelligence. But even if AI is the partner in the passenger seat, you must still have your hands on the wheel. We all know what happens when we think the machine knows the answer. There, I think, is the real danger of AI, that we will abdicate responsibility and control to the new technology until we can’t function without it. 

Then, yes, AI will replace us, but only because we will have let it. 

—by Anat Deracine

Take Action!

Wondering what you can do to speak out against the changes rocking our community? Here are three easy steps you can take:

  1. Join a collective action movement like Indivisible to connect with local resistance actions.

  2. Try the 5 Calls app which makes it easy to get in touch with your representatives (and if you call after hours, you can leave a voicemail)

  3. Stay informed:

    1. Keep an eye on legislation through the US Government’s legislation tracker

    2. Take a free class at Harvard:

      1. American Government: Constitutional Foundations

        Learn how early American politics informed the U.S. Constitution and why its promise of liberty and equality has yet to be fully realized.

      2. Citizen Politics in America: Public Opinion, Elections, Interest Groups, and the Media

        Learn about the forces in American politics that seek to influence the electorate and shift the political landscape.

      3. U.S. Political Institutions: Congress, Presidency, Courts, and Bureaucracy

        Examine the inner workings of the three branches of the U.S. Federal Government.

      4. U.S. Public Policy: Social, Economic, and Foreign Policies

        Learn about public policy in America and the dynamics of American politics.

      5. Justice

        This introduction to moral and political philosophy is one of the most popular courses taught at Harvard College.

      6. Rhetoric: The Art of Persuasive Writing and Public Speaking

        Gain critical communication skills in writing and public speaking with this introduction to American political rhetoric.

  4. Pick up trash. Seriously, take a trash bag on your neighborhood walk and pick up some of the litter you find (wear gloves or bring a second bag to pick things up with). Maybe we can’t yet get rid of some of our elected trash or fix the issue of AI water and energy use, but you can make a difference in your neighborhood and burn off some of your simmering rage and worry in the process. Small actions matter, and completing small actions makes it easier to envision larger ones.

—by Anna Burke

Reminder: Own Your Voice

With abounding turmoil in the world, as well as all the recent discussion about platform boycotts and catfishing authors, we’re all aware of the ways that our communities, our voices—our selves—are vulnerable. Though I hesitate to pile on, there’s another vector we need to watch before we’re abruptly silenced.

Our own spheres of influence.

If social media is the only way you’re connected to your greater audience, you’re vulnerable. If you’re relying on only one platform to communicate with your readers, you’re vulnerable.

If someone else is managing your contact list, you’re vulnerable.

Think about the barriers between you and your audience. You have a website, but who hosts it, and would a change in company policy affect your hosting contract if they don’t like your content? You have dozens or hundreds (or thousands) of followers, but on whose platform, and how could their political views or subscription model change their account management?

The ways we connect with those we hope will support our work is almost exclusively through sites and companies we don’t own.

On the other hand, hosting your own website or discussion forum is a tall order. Managing those entities well can become a second (or third or fourth) job, not to mention a technical pain with a high learning curve. That’s why most of us don’t do it anymore.

While easy solutions are hard to find, a few simple tactics will help you achieve a strategy to fortify yourself in the ever-changing landscape of platform management:

  • Two is one and one is none: make sure your readers can find you in more than one place. One social media platform may be easier to manage, but if your account gets blocked or deleted (as recently happened to me), you’ll want an alternative for your readers to support your work.

  • Hot mic – is this thing on? Maintain direct control of your own mailing list. Get all those social media contacts funneled into a list you control so you can reach them if social media loses its glow. You may still need to use a mailing list management tool, so make sure you backup (and periodically export!) those contact lists.

  • No filter: build your personal network, even if it’s only a handful of people. Get their phone number and/or personal email address so you have a way to contact them outside of social media. That level of connection gains more value every day that platforms we’ve come to rely on decide the data we provide them is the real product, not our engagement.

Make sure you aren’t silenced. Take these steps to protect yourself. Your stories save lives, and your readers need your voice.

—by Virginia Black

Ways to Promote Yourself on Social Media with Alaina Erdell and Kris Bryant

Here are some marketing links mentioned in the video:

SASS Surveys Sapphic Lit Authors

This May, SASS distributed a short survey to authors of sapphic literature with the goal of figuring out how SASS can best support authors. Questions focused on what concerns authors have about the current state of sapphic literature and what types of support they would like to see from SASS. 

In total, 85 authors responded to the survey. 89% of them have at least one book that has been published. For 68% of respondents, publishing is their primary source of income, while for another 21%, publishing is not their primary source of income.

When it comes to concerns regarding their careers as authors of sapphic literature, an overwhelming majority of respondents indicated that they are presently concerned about their career as an author of sapphic literature. Some of the most common reasons for concern included the use of AI, ongoing book banning campaigns, current economic turmoils, and ongoing Amazon boycotts. 

Respondents were also asked about challenges they are currently facing in their careers as authors of sapphic literature. Some of the most common challenges listed were marketing their books, declining sales, having their books pirated or copied by AI, the mental and emotional challenges they face in writing, and book bans. When asked how the current political climate affected their thinking about the challenges they face, just over one third said that politics did affect their responses.  

Another type of challenge that some respondents mentioned had to do with issues surrounding gatekeeping and being made to feel like they do not belong in sapphic literature spaces. Some respondents mentioned difficulties in finding community, while others reported instances of transphobia and intolerance within the community. Some respondents who do not write romance also indicated a sense of being overlooked in the sapphic literature community and when it comes to marketing their writing.  

In terms of support, the majority of respondents said that they had either a lot or some support, while only 8 respondents felt like they had no support at all. The majority of respondents also indicated that they would like more support in their careers as authors of sapphic literature. None responded that they wished for no support. The most frequently named type of support that authors asked for was help in finding and organizing a community of authors of sapphic literature. Other common types of support mentioned were cross-marketing, marketing tips and advice, tips and advice related to writing craft, and news about what is going on in publishing and the sapphic literature community. 

Lastly, respondents were asked about what they would like to see in future SASS newsletters. Some of the most common things said reflected the types of support mentioned in the previous question (e.g. community building, marketing tips, industry news). Additional topics included information about how to fight piracy and AI, information related to political activism, long-time authors sharing their experiences, resources for writing, publishing, and marketing, and opportunities for collaboration. 

These results will be invaluable to SASS as we continue to explore ways we can support our fellow authors.

—by Jamie Rose

Reader’s Nook

Countries

Friends are making lists
Of countries
Checking passports
And family trees

I too want to flee
To abandon the one
Slipping from my grasp 

The fading light of
That city on the hill
Glimpse it if you squint
real hard
‘fore it vanishes
and you awaken
To find out
It’s gone 

My homelands
Now frighten me
Ruled by tyrants
Holding tight
To escape cells
Lands once
full of promise
E Pluribus Unum
Hatikva
Fading Hope 

I need Another Country
Full of potential
Since this one is barren
And will soon be emptying Itself
of those seeking hope

Yet there still may be
time
to grasp
something
From down in the dregs
Praying
For a good, strong seed
In that residue
That can grow 

—Cindy Rizzo, November 6, 2024

Borrelia

November.  No lights flashed high in the 
darkness for us as the cold came killer-
close and shook you awake. The stars were still 
stars, so far north in a strange country.  

The tearing of silence, sleepless weeping
wracked the room. You were tiny, fever-
hot and shivering in my arms. That night 
our Autumn was eaten like piles of  

maple leaves. The sun rises a blood 
blister between birch bones, and spills scarlet 
over you, curled fetal on the thin mat 
we called a bed. Morning is still morning, 

even as sickness spreads a red hyper-
graphic scrawl over your belly, chest and 
legs. Finally the fourth doctor does something 
more than humor us. Weeks pass and snow grows. 

Winter is still winter. From Blackstone to 
Mendon your body calls out, a soft 
groan, shifting stiffly as the truck tires 
pack slush to ice, bear down, grind forward.

Driving together those mornings I watched 
you warm your fingers in the coffee steam. 
Your body, bird-thin, frailer in winds 
that tipped a twenty degree day down to 

single digits. The barn at dawn; so 
quiet, iced over, a low hum of life
inside. We pried metal from metal as
the building sighed a great cool breath of hay.

The arena black, the walkways too. 
Those days we thawed the pipes, and carried the
crowbar to the paddocks. The ice out-
side inches thick, we broke it and thrust

our hands into the buckets fishing out
the floes. I knew without looking, how you 
suffered, fingers locked in neuralgic nightmares.
Before the sickness I marveled at you, 

your fine hands guiding them; a thousand pounds 
or more of force yielding to your touch. Stepping 
in time with even the stallion, your gait 
a thing of beauty backlit by the autumn 

sun. December—you are swallowed, even 
“healed”, as they say—assuring us of
their astuteness, their antibiotic
powers, a prowess that we have seen in 

shambles; triage hall, waiting and exam
room. Repeat. Something in you has been 
broken. You move in stiff lines lugging
your pain, a bucket of cold water

sloshing against your hip and thigh when least
expected; the jolt, the pause, the lingering
soaks through you. Yet power is still power.
My eyes follow as you move step after 

step toward the ice path, muscles straining, 
lead line taut, as a nervous Arabian threatens 
to balk at so much sunlight glaring in 
the white swirling wasteland of the farm. 

—by Jules Revel

Reading is an Act of Resistance

I read less than I used to. Or rather, I read constantly for work, providing feedback on student stories and reading my friends’ manuscripts and advance reader copies for reviews and blurbs, all of which I love, but none of which can truly be called reading for pleasure. Recently, I made an active decision to change this, and it has brought back a joy I’d forgotten I needed.

It took a while to overcome the paralyzing fear that I should be doing other work instead of doing something for myself. Even telling myself I needed to read to stay up to date on literary conversations didn’t work, because while that is true, it meant my reading list was still dictated by others. I missed the pure joy of running my hands along a bookshelf and choosing a book at random, then spending hours lost in the pages, free from the worries of our current timeline. I craved that escape, and more, I needed the inspiration that comes from refilling the creative well. Yet I struggled to sit still. There were all those out-standing book contracts I owed my publisher (and my readers), and the work of previous students I’d agreed to read after the course ended, and of course the fucking laundry… You get the idea. Maybe you have a similar list.

Audiobooks helped. I could read and do something “productive” at the same time, but I wanted to be able to sit and read again. I wanted to commit to carving out time in my day for the one thing that has always brought me comfort. I wanted to make the oligarchs cry by taking time to do something for myself, sinking into the stories of my community like a warm bath.

Finally, something clicked. The real reason I wasn’t reading wasn’t because I had trouble with work-life balance; it was because I was scared.

The world, you may have noticed, has taken an alarming turn of late. Surely, though, if I worked extra hard and filled my schedule with work and chronic illness management I could control my sphere of influence and protect myself and my loved ones. That’s how life works, right? If I let my guard down enough to sink into a story, my control might slip.

This fear has also affected my writing. I struggle to access the headspace of my characters because if I forget for one second about all the problems in the world, they might pounce while my back is turned. I don’t even like cooking anymore, which I used to find creative and enriching. Is this anxiety? Yes, but unlike the anxiety I often feel, there are real and present dangers out there. The right is actively trying to take away things, people, and ideas I love.

Yet here I was, taking some of those very same things away from myself, all because I was afraid to lose them. When I realized this I got angry. Then I went to the library. And I read. I sat on my deck and I let my work fall to the wayside and I devoured three books in a row.

And you know what? I felt better. The world hadn’t changed, but I had. I had new stories in me. I felt powerful and capable. I felt resilient. Most importantly, I felt connected to a larger community who had already shown itself up the the challenge of fighting fascism. I wasn’t alone.

Reading is an act of resistance. It can’t be the only action we take, but it’s a start. We’ve fought hard for the right to form the vibrant literary community we have today, and I, for one, am not willing to lose that—either to those who want to take it away, or to my own fears.

—by Anna Burke

The SASS newsletter provides our community with information, analysis, resources, and even short sapphic fiction to keep us informed, mobilized, and connected. By working together to defend our community, our literature and our livelihoods, we can surmount the obstacles placed in our path and thrive! 

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