Mary Dickson

MARY DICKSON is an award-winning Salt Lake City writer who has written about nuclear testing-related topics and worked on issues of peace and justice for three decades. A former newspaper reporter who now works in public broadcasting, she has written newspaper and magazine articles, essays, and opinion pieces on a broad range of subjects. She wrote and coproduced the PBS documentary No Safe Place: Violence Against Women. Her monologue, Eager, was performed and published by the Salt Lake Acting Company and is used in several college English courses. This essay includes some excerpts from her "Downwinders All," in Learning to Glow: A Nuclear Reader, edited by hhn Bradley (Phoenix: University of Arizona, 2002), 127-31. ©2000 The Arizona Board of Regents. Reprinted by permission of the University of Arizona.

Living and Dying with Fallout

Articles/Essays – Volume 37, No. 2

Last summer, while I was reading the Salt Lake Tribune, I stumbled across the obituary of a beautiful woman who looked uncannily like my older sister, Ann. That’s why I read her obituary. Only when I saw the list of Lisa McPhie’s survivors did I realize she was Lisa Lundberg, who had grown up with me on a quiet tree-lined street in Salt Lake City. Her older sisters were my best friends in junior high school. We were inseparable then. Thirty years later, Lisa, who watched our teenage escapades with a hint of boredom, was dead of a rare blood disorder that had defied diagnosis since she first became ill in 1985.