While on my mission in Taiwan, I dropped a letter off my balcony onto my neighbor’s kitchen roof. While trying to retrieve the letter, I fell through the roof and broke a rib. This incident provides the controlling metaphor for my forthcoming book, The Rib Cage: the lush, edenic paradise of inland Taiwan; the rib, in this case, a broken rib, out of which woman is created; the fall; the knowledge it makes available; and the subsequent expulsion from the presence of God, as well as the growth made possible by that expulsion.

Holly Welker, Karen Marguerite Moloney