Karen Marguerite Moloney

Karen Marguerite Moloney got her playwriting start as a child in Whittier, CA, where she wrote and produced her first plays on a picnic table stage. She acted throughout high school and college and minored in drama at BYU and, if she’d said yes, would today be a high school drama teacher in Southern CA. Instead she earned an M.A. in creative writing from BYU and a Ph.D. in 20th-century British and Irish literature from UCLA. An English professor at Weber State University, she teaches literature and creative writing. She travels regularly to North Friesland, a place whose “beauty won’t leave her be.” No surprise, really, that she should set two plays along that haunting coastline. She also served as editor of Dialogue a Journal of Mormon Thought.

Articles

Letters to the Editor

Singing in Harmony, Stitching in Time

Spring 1911. Seated in her parlor on the farm they lease, Bertha Hansen shivers as she slips her needle through beige linen. Heinrich has booked a trip to Germany, a visit home, but as departure draws near, uneasiness envelops her like the white mist of their native marsh. Does danger await them, a great storm perhaps, and is the chill she feels a premonition? Or is it simple bad humor, a wife’s irritation with a husband who squanders money on steamship tickets when they’re saving to buy a farm?

Morning Has Broken | Robert A. Rees, Waiting for Morning

The day the head gasket blew in the California desert, it was late summer, 1987—and therefore, stiflingly hot. The painter’s van was hooked to a travel trailer, living quarters for my foster brother Karl, his…

Gambit in the Throbs of a Ten-Year-Old Swamp: Confessions of a Dialogue Intern

How does an English graduate student who wants a visit to the East Coast, instruction in the American political system and an introduction into the Mormon publishing world satisfy these three ambitions in one two-month…

Roo Hunt

The magpies sang all morning long that May
To lovers in the gum leaves where they lie.
Half my heart is half a world away.

Relinquishing

(25 November 1975—Los Angeles)

Already cold, your quiet body lies,
The ravage done, small protest to the sheet.
Beyond your window through November skies,
Sycamore leaves go drifting to the street.

Recollections from an Ex

mused in several voices
to the tune of tinkling cymbals

It wasn’t like she didn’t blend right in.
In fact, based on the type of clothes she wore,
People always figured she was from Salt Lake.
Her skirts were long enough, that’s for sure.

Snowfall at Glenflesk

The hush that sheathes the road is sure and slow.
My lights suspend a galaxy of flakes:
The silence is as haunted as the snow.

Life in Zion after Conversion: Hazed or Hailed?: Beached on the Wasatch Front: Probing the Us and Them Paradigm

In a chapter from her autobiography, Blackberry Winter, Margaret Mead describes the rejection she experienced during her freshman year at DePauw, a small midwestern college. Students had come to DePauw, in Mead’s words, “for fraternity…

Eternity Be Damned? The Impact of Interfaith Vows: Introductory Remarks

In any religion that stresses the importance of marriages between its members, choosing to marry someone of another faith is not a casual act. In fact, marrying outside the home faith is likely to incur…

I Married a Mormon and Lived to Tell This Tale: Introductory Remarks

Members of other religions, or persons with no religious affiliation, take on special challenges when they marry Latter-day Saints. In addition to the same problems any inter-faith marriage might encounter—conflicts over church attendance, child-rearing, value…

Song of the Old/Oldsongs | Leatrice Lifshitz, Only Morning in Her Shoes: Poems about Old Women

As Leatrice Lifshitz explains in her introduction, this unusual collection of verse represents “an attempt to return old women to the circle, to the continuum of women and of life” (p. viii), and its rich…

Day Dreams

Man of her house, her rooms
Are haunted by dreams.

Leavened by cool morning light,
Loft become sanctum, he lolls

Saints for All Seasons: Lavina Fielding Anderson and Bernard Shaw’s Joan of Arc

In September of 1993 Lavina Fielding Anderson was excommunicated from the LDS church for documenting and publishing instances of the church’s punishing treatment of Mormon intellectuals and feminists, as well as other instances of ecclesiastical abuse.

Editor’s Introduction: Wicks, Modems, and the Winds of War

Standing as we still do on the brink of a new millennium, Latter-day Saints share with their neighbors and friends across the globe a profound interest in the fortunes of twenty-first-century war and peace. Not only do we wish to live our lives and raise our children under a quiet sky in safety and peace, far from the addictive savagery to which humankind sinks in time of war, but as an increasingly international church committed to sending missionaries into all the countries of the world, who could dispute the advantages if all those countries were at peace?