Glass is ubiquitous in our lives — in our homes, cars and electronic devices — though it’s usually something we look through rather than gaze at in its own right. As a building material it can last for centuries, allowing in sunlight while repelling the elements, then shatter instantly if struck with enough force by the tiniest projectile. Stained glass can dazzle the imagination, telling a familiar story in a new and illuminating way.
In January 2021, as the world was in the grip of a terrifying pandemic and the U.S. seemed on the verge of a second civil war, Stephen Kiernan began writing a novel about stained glass and how a nation, fractured by an existential crisis, begins to repair itself. Having found no compelling story of national healing and rebirth in American history, the 63-year-old Charlotte author looked instead to post-World War II France for inspiration.
It was there that Kiernan set his fifth novel, The Glass Château, about Asher, a Jewish boot maker turned assassin for the French Resistance. The story begins in June 1945, after the war has claimed Asher’s family, home, profession and reason for living. He sets off across the devastated French countryside in search of safe haven and solace from his grief and guilt. He eventually finds refuge and purpose in a centuries-old atelier, where master glassmakers and glassblowers have been commissioned by the Catholic church to restore the once-great stained glass windows of a bombed-out cathedral.
At its heart, The Glass Château is a story about healing wounded souls. Every character in Kiernan’s novel is profoundly damaged by war — physically, emotionally, psychologically. Yet their long and slow recoveries require that they set aside their profound differences and surrender their individuality to a greater cause.
As a metaphor, Kiernan explained, “Stained glass worked because the men are all hard and fragile, because humans are hard and fragile. And it takes a lot of people to make a big stained glass window.”
Writing a novel may seem like just the opposite — a mostly solo endeavor. But for Kiernan, this book was a communal effort that tapped the knowledge and expertise of Burlington’s many skilled glassmakers. The finished product reflects the rigorous research skills that Kiernan honed during his years as a journalist, nonfiction author and health care advocate.
By now, Kiernan is himself a familiar character in Vermont. A 1982 Middlebury College graduate who briefly left Vermont to work in other cities — New York; Baltimore; Atlanta; Albany, N.Y.; and Iowa City — he returned in 1990 to become the business editor, and then an editorial writer, at the Burlington Free Press.
Then, after years of penning editorials about health care reform — “By now, I’ve written about a million words on the subject,” he said — Kiernan left the newspaper in 2005 to write the critically acclaimed nonfiction book Last Rights: Rescuing the End of Life From the Medical System. The book examines the pitfalls of Western medicine’s approach to dying and the lessons he learned from his own parents’ final days. Kiernan has since published four other novels, including his most successful to date, The Baker’s Secret, in 2017.
Though he left journalism 18 years ago, the discipline of the profession never left him, and it’s made Kiernan a productive author. The Glass Château took him just 29 months to complete, from typing its first sentence to the book’s release in June. When Kiernan sat down for a midmorning interview at Village Wine and Coffee in Shelburne, he’d been awake since before dawn working on another novel. Just weeks earlier, he had delivered to his editor the first draft of still another book.
Why stained glass? As Kiernan admitted, he’d never previously tried his hand at glassmaking or even taken an art history class. But about six years ago, he saw a retrospective on artist Marc Chagall’s works in Montréal that featured his stained glass windows.
“It blew my mind,” Kiernan said. The Russian and French modernist was born Moishe Shagal and raised Jewish in what’s now Belarus. Initially, Kiernan considered making Chagall a character in the book. Ultimately, he used one of Chagall’s early sketches, of a man perched on a rooftop, as the basis of a story in the novel. (See the excerpt below.)
Chagall wasn’t the only reason Kiernan made his main character Jewish. For a World War II renewal story, he wanted someone who would have experienced a crisis of faith and who struggled to leave his battlefield deeds behind.
While working on this and earlier novels, Kiernan interviewed combat veterans from five different wars. He described meeting one who had just returned from his third deployment to Iraq.
“He was a little tense, you might say,” Kiernan recalled. As the pair slowly walked down Burlington’s Church Street, Kiernan noticed his companion scanning the rooftops and asked him why.
“‘Just looking for snipers,'” Kiernan remembered the vet replying. “He still had the war in him.”
While writing the first draft of The Glass Château, Kiernan was invited to two artist-in-residency programs in France. During one six-week trip, he visited Reims Cathedral, in northeastern France, whose construction began in the 13th century.
“For a thousand years, it’s where the French crowned their kings, until they cut off their heads,” he said.
Kiernan described his first experience of entering the sanctuary, which is longer than a football field, with a 250-foot-high ceiling and towering stained glass windows. As he explored the interior, Kiernan noticed placards along one wall that chronicle the cathedral’s long history.
At the end of World War II, Reims Cathedral was the first place where French officials sat down with their German counterparts to embark on rapprochement. At the time, all the church windows were destroyed and boarded up. As Kiernan explained, the German delegation asked the French to find their finest stained glass makers, take down the boards and “bring the light of God back in. And the German people will pay for it.” The first windows installed were made by Chagall.
At that moment, Kiernan realized that The Glass Château was no longer a fairy tale but a parable of individual and national healing. Today, he noted, Germany and France are essential trading partners who share a common currency and umbrella government, the European Union. “And it all started with a stained glass window,” he said.
But to write extensively about stained glass, Kiernan needed to learn how it’s made. So, like any good reporter, he turned to the nearest experts — in this case, the glass artisans in Burlington’s South End.
Among them was 75-year-old Larry Ribbecke, a self-taught artisan who, for 40 years, has been crafting and restoring many of the stained glass windows found in homes and houses of worship throughout Vermont and New York’s North Country.
Ribbecke’s Pine Street studio glows with the colored light cast by dozens of stained glass windows. On the wall above a light table are intricately detailed mosaics featuring traditional Christian icons. One piece, titled “The Visitation,” portrays the Virgin Mary, pregnant with Jesus, standing with Saint Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist.
Other windows reflect Ribbecke’s fascination with science and nature, including an octopus, an anatomically correct heart and Ribbecke’s interpretation of Albert Einstein’s theory of gravitational waves.
Ask him a simple question, such as whether glass is a solid or liquid — technically, it’s neither — and Ribbecke might expound on everything from medieval glass-cutting methods to the molecular structure of silica, a primary component of glass.
When Kiernan first entered his studio, Ribbecke recalled, “It didn’t seem like he knew enough to write a book about it. But it also seemed like he was willing to learn.”
In all, Kiernan spent hours with Ribbecke, watching and learning how stained glass is made. Of Kiernan’s description of glassmaking in the novel, his teacher said, “My goal is for you to not fuck up.”
Kiernan didn’t, Ribbecke concluded. As a fictional work, the novel takes a few minor liberties with the history of French glassmaking of that era — notably, Kiernan’s depiction of stained glass artists blowing their own glass. Nevertheless, Kiernan captured “the spirit of the undertaking,” Ribbecke added. “He got the cooperation despite disparate personalities. And I think he got Asher as close to Marc Chagall as you could get.”
To learn about glassblowing, Kiernan went across the street to AO Glass, where cofounder Rich Arentzen and artisan Rob Beckham told him to put down his notebook and try it himself.
“He was very diligent and curious. You could tell he had a journalistic background,” Arentzen recalled.
So how did he do?
“He was a strong beginner,” Arentzen said diplomatically, “with an open attitude and a self-deprecating sense of humor.”
“I was so spectacularly shitty at it,” Kiernan confessed. “The artisans at AO Glass were just shaking their heads.”
Nevertheless, after multiple visits, his skills improved slightly. And when Beckham taught him how to make a glass flower — 50 of them, actually — Kiernan went home and wrote a glass flower into the story.
Then, when the book came out, Kiernan held his launch party in front of the furnaces at AO Glass. They set out 50 seats — and 220 people showed up. Kiernan was overwhelmed by the outpouring of support. As he put it, “It changes how you feel about a community and your place in it.”
Outside Vermont, The Glass Château has generated similar enthusiasm. Throughout the summer, Kiernan drove 7,000 miles to readings in more than 40 cities. The last, at a synagogue in Boca Raton, Fla., drew nearly 500 attendees. At each event, Kiernan gave away a glass flower that he’d made, a symbol of life’s beauty and fragility.
The flowers held personal significance, too. In the early months of writing The Glass Château, Kiernan was suddenly confronted with his own fragility when he experienced a near-deadly health emergency. For a time, his blood pressure spiked dangerously high, and Kiernan, an avid cyclist and swimmer, could barely climb a flight of stairs without gasping for air. Hospitalized and incapacitated for weeks, Kiernan said he emerged from the crisis “a changed man.”
That, too, made it into the novel. Kiernan turned his own mortality into a character named Euclid, who, with his companion, Pascal, continually harass Asher and threaten, half-seriously, to take his life. Like death itself, Euclid gets the book’s final word.
“As long as the man keeps telling stories,” Euclid says about Asher, “I say we do not kill him.”
The Grim Reaper might say the same about Kiernan.
Excerpt from The Glass Château:
“Marie, I think I may be in love with you.”
She drew back. “I advise you to use that word carefully.”
“Why? If I tell my heart’s truth, the risk is to me alone.”
“You underestimate the danger. I do not know one person who has today what she loved yesterday.”
“The past is not the future.”
“Yes, it is.” Marie sipped her wine. “Now tell me a story.”
Asher stood. She wanted to change the subject. Did not want to talk about love. He reached toward the cat, but it darted away, an orange blur. Suddenly he knew exactly the story for her to hear.
“It’s one of my first memories. Remembered as if in dim light, when I was four or at most five years old. It was a sweltering day, the house stifling, everyone complaining. My grandfather took a bowl of carrots onto the roof to eat in the shade. Normally he was as serious as a funeral, dressed all in black, and strict as a judge about rules and religion. I was frightened of him, though I believe I loved him too, as a child does. We heard his shoes overhead. He was having fun up there, I could hear him calling out to anyone passing by. I went outside and peered up at him from the walk. He waved and hallooed as if I were half a mile off. I can still see the old man’s immense beard, pure white against his traditional garb.”
Asher was surprised at how amused he felt, what lightness there was in telling this memory. “When he came back down, there were bits of orange in his beard. It was funny to me, sidesplitting really. Tiny bits of carrot in the white. Of course, I tried to hide it, holding both hands over my mouth. But I was afraid to say anything. It might be considered criticism when I only meant to be helpful, so I held back behind the door. But my grandmother also had noticed. She went right over, stood in his way, and picked those bits out without comment. Every one of them. Then she took the bowl and brushed him along on his way.”
What Asher did not say was that this was the love he wanted for his life, where affection was as ordinary as the air. He had no idea how his grandparents accomplished it. The chemistry Asher felt with Marie was powerful, propelled by desire and the wish to heal. And here she was, listening to every word. Yet it was nothing like picking carrots from his beard.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Fragile Figures | In The Glass Château, Stephen Kiernan crafts a tale of national and personal renewal in postwar France”
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