Today we welcome author Stephen Kiernan to discuss his novel, “The Glass Chateau”—a story that journeys beyond battlefields to post-World War II France, capturing the life of Asher, an assassin turned artist inspired by Marc Chagall. Within the fictional town of Clovide, this narrative explores love, loss, and the transformative power of stained glass art. Learn how Kiernan’s journalistic roots, decorated with accolades like the George Polk Award, fuel his drive to craft nuanced characters and emotionally impactful stories.
As we unravel the fabric of Kiernan’s novel, we don’t just stop at the details of war-torn France. Stephen Kiernan grants us a glimpse into his upcoming book, “The Finder,” challenging the norms of heroism and representation in modern literature. Dive into this episode to explore how historical landmarks, like the cathedral in Reims, serve as narrative backdrops, and ponder with us on the evolving trends and necessities of WWII fiction in the present day. It’s not just a tale of war; it’s a lens through which we explore unity, healing, and the multifaceted human condition.
Buy “The Glass Chateau” on Amazon
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Find my book reviews on ViewsOnBooks.com.
Hi everybody this is Blaine Dan sanis and I welcome you to the newest edition of books and looks brought to you by your good friends at podcast Studio X and it’s that time when we have our weekly podcast in which we take a look at a book interview the author and then
Has something I’m looking at and boy have we got a good book today the book’s called the glass chatau and I really hope all of you go to my website views on books.com and read that review It’s a Wonderful review if you know we try not
To give away a lot of the spoilers during our interview but that’s why I’m hoping you go and you read that review okay also you’re going to be able to get this uh podcast on Apple podcast on Spotify and for those of you who prefer
It we have it as an audio only on YouTube get it that way too anyway Steve Karan is here from Vermont he’s joining us today and he’s talking all about this book which was inspired by the life of the artist Mark shagal a wonderful artist who got into stained glass
Windows uh in the 1950s It’s a Wonderful uh wonderful uh book that was inspired by him it’s all about healing in postwar France and we have a main character by name of Asher who was an assassin in the resistance and he is in need of help
He’s in need of uh definitely peace and there’s a lot of very interesting questions and philosophical questions that we talk about in here having to deal with War and Peace as well as the healing process that so many people have and Stephen is going to tell us all
About his experiences also in learning how to try to blow glass himself and make some stained glass and all the difficulty and what the town of cloid which is his town in this book what is based upon in the cathedral they working on what’s that based upon and we follow
These people we follow all these this group of people who have been again hurt by World War I and they get together but they all have a talent in one way or the other uh to make stained glass and it’s a really interesting and inspiring very good book I think you’re are really
Going to enjoy it again it’s one that that is not your traditional book on World War II so I without you know without any further Ado let’s just go right in and have our chat with Steve curen Stephen welcome to books and looks glad to be with you thank you Steve is
Joining us today from up in Scenic Vermont as a matter of fact we’re recording this on National Vermont day which Steve says everyday is National Vermont day for him you know it’s beautiful out here and I look out at probably, 1400 Acres of Farmland from my basement office and the sun is shining
And you know it hasn’t snowed yet so I’m very happy that’s great anyway before we get into your books you have got my friend a wonderful background could you tell us a little bit about yourself where did you go to college would you take creative writing courses how did you get into
This whole writing profession I guess the place I start with that story bla is I grew up in a rural you know small town in Upstate New York and I’m one of seven kids and I’m on the young end and so we all would have dinner together every
Night so there’s nine of us around the table and it’s all strong personalities and I don’t remember remember this so much but my brother Mike tells us you know about me like starting a story and just doing everything I could to keep everyone at the table’s attention for as
Long as I could as the young kid you know and then of course they always moved on I was a boring little kid but I remember telling stories to my grandmother my mother’s mother who I loved and you know I think I’ve always been a Storyteller so the problem is of
Course my folks were very conservative people and they really between the Depression and World War II and so on they really believe believed that you could not make a living as a writer and they were very concerned about that and really opposed me being a writer and I
Remember one time my mother just cut out I with no comment she just put it on my pillow when I came home from college one semester on my pillow was a headline from The New York Times and said average US author makes $6,000 a year you know
And I thought like well that’s the kind of encouragement the son likes but what I did was for the next 10 years that was taped on the wall above my typewriter as a motivator you you know and there’s a way that it really tested my commitment
To it when I got out of college I spent some time working in business and was not great at it and was getting up early in the morning to write and I wrote a terrible terrible novel during that time but I was trying it and I realized I
Needed to get more schooling in it I had gone to Middlebury College and had a good English literature education and some writing classes that were helpful but I really could you can only go so far on your own at least that was my feeling I got into the Iowa Writers
Workshop and spent a couple years out there there and it was terrific and competitive but really supportive too and while I was there for the cash that I needed I started writing for the local newspaper and that ended up turning into about 20 years of working in newspapers
Which was at that time very very compelling work you know the industry of local news is in really rough shape for a lot of reasons I can carry on about but fundamentally it meant that I was immersed for all those years in the stories of the communities that I was in
In and I was working with language all the time and I started to write about Healthcare in particular and that was the beat that I had and they were talking about changing some laws for end of life care and even physician assisted suicide was proposed here in Vermont and
As I started to write about this people started coming up to me and telling me stories from their lives about how their grandmother’s life had ended or how their father died and sometimes they were lovely stories but most of the time they were pretty hideous and it was
About way too much medical intervention and no one acknowledging when the end was near all that sort of thing so I wrote a non-fiction book called last rights about how we can take better care of people in the last chapter of their lives and then I was in the book world
And after a couple of non-fiction books I said look I’ve always wanted to be writing novels I’ve written a bunch on the side that weren’t very good I’m going to take the leap and now you know I’ve just delivered my sixth novel manuscript to my editor New York and I
Feel very very for I do not have a big talent I have a very small one but I have a big work ethic so I revise and revise and revise it’s a trick about writing is you can make yourself look better than you are and smarter than you are because you go over
Something 20 times to improve it and so that’s been it and I’ve been very very fortunate and I hope that you know so I’ve had eight books out now and six of them novels and you know I’d like to get another 18 I want my last act to be to be typing the
End the book and then I’m done done I really love the work I really do I was just reading something about Lucy mud Montgomery who wrote the an of green Gable series and she wrote 18 books and delivered her last book to the publisher on the day she died and took 60 some
Years till it was published but it finally got published it’s a great story last night I was in a zoom call for the poet Bob pack and he died in June but his book came out this week his last book and I think it’s his 25th or
Something like that wow it was great cuz it was all these poets and writers and people that have been students of his or colleagues of his for the last 70 years it was pretty terrific actually yeah wow you don’t downplay your journalism but you’re an award winner not just a
Journalist you won the George PK award if I’m not mistaken what is the George pulk award and what was that all about it wasn’t a Target that I had my sight side on or anything but what happened is that I kept hearing stories about Physicians in this state who were making
Big mistakes and not being penalized in any way and I found a physician who wrote herself prescriptions for thousands and thousands of opioid pills and a surgeon who had multiple wrong sight surgeries so you know supposed to fix the right knee and he fixed the left knee stuff like that and nothing
Happened to these people and it turned out that there was a regulatory system for Physicians and it was really broken and the stories of people and what had happened to them were very compelling so I wrote about that I was told you know I didn’t even know that my editor had
Entered me in this and she said hey you won the George pul award and I said great and the guy who called me up from the award was incredibly flattering and was like okay so there’s this lunch in New York where I go to to get the award
And I get there and the two of the other people getting it that day are Gloria steum and the man who was on 60 Minutes forever and ever and I’m forgetting his name now it was like people at that level you know and I’m like like at that
Point I was working at the Burlington Free Press in Vermont and so I did not have the kind of credentials of those folks or the size audience but I did have again sort of that work ethic and it was old shoe leather kind of reporting so it’s pretty fun to be in
That setting and you know you don’t at least I don’t do any writing for the awards it’s that I love the writing and I love the readers those are really the things that motivate me and yeah my journalism did really well I got 40 Awards over the course of the years that
I did that it was never the goal it was really like to enjoy what I got to learn and writing it and then really being like as good to readers as I could be which is about accuracy and craft when there’s time and telling the best story
And trying to find the best story all those sorts of things I was gonna say that’s a lot of chicken dinners to get your Awards yeah it’s a lot of State Board of Education meetings I’ll tell you that in my share oh oh by Oh by well
Let’s get on to the glass chatau you you know what was your inspiration for writing this book and the time period could you talk a little bit about that where I started was you try to think about what kind of a story are people going to want to read in two years or
Three and if in my mind in the later part of 2020 you know when we were really in the coid mess still and there was a lot of political Discord in the country and we had the me too movement was really getting traction black lives matter had become an important part of
The discourse in the country there was all of this passion that was being expressed and a lot of division and I thought you know that only lasts so long and then something else occurs and so I thought what kind of a story are people going to want they’re going to want a
Healing story they are and I’ve been writing these War Stories these World War II stories uh started looking for healing stories and you know I looked to reconstruction the United States after the Civil War and in my Layman’s understanding of it we didn’t do a great
Job so that was not the place to do it and so I mean there’s still unhealed wounds from that all these years later and I’m not a politici or policy guy I don’t know what the answer is but I knew that that wasn’t the story that I felt
People needed and so I started shopping around and I remembered that when I was doing the research for the baker secret back in 2015 you know and I was looking at pictures of the time I saw all these destroyed Cathedrals when I was in France to do the research for the book
All the cathedrals were rebuilt and beautiful and gorgeous and amazing and sacred feeling places and so I thought the rebuilding of the cathedrals after World War II that might be a very interesting rebuilding story and so that started my research and then I found that there were individual artists who
Had built their reputations on the windows that they built the stained glass windows for bomb out Cathedrals and that among those people was Mark shagal this great great great artist and here I say about Mark shagal I’m not an art historian I’ve never taken a class
In art or anything like that but I remember when I was working construction in my 20s early 20s and I was on the demolition team of a construction company and one day we’re working and this woman walked by who was a friend of mine and she stopped and we were all
Like you know sweaty muddy guys on our lunch break and she said you want to have a beer after work and I said yeah and when she left for the rest of the day all the guys on the crew called me Romeo now I don’t think they all knew
Shakespeare but somehow Romeo and Juliet was in their mind right they called me Romeo and the same is true with Mark shagal even if you don’t know anything about this guy I’ll just tell you that when he was about the same age I was when I was working construction to make
A living he was painting backdrops for an Opera Company in Moscow and there was one Opera they were doing about great music and he painted a guy playing a violin who was like three times the size of a building and he’s sort of above a town he’s maybe floating in the air or
He’s maybe more like dancing on the houses and that sort of thing and that’s where the Fiddler on the Roof came from from ah okay we know Mark shagal even if we’ve never seen any of it and his stained glass windows completely cool and transformed it and I said that’s
What I’m doing I’m going to do a story about rebuilding the cathedrals but in particular the stained glass windows and so I took men from every kind of politics and background all of them damaged by the war and somehow they got to work together to build these windows
And that’s how what happened and so while Mark shagal is an inspiration he’s not really a character in this book He’s not but work is he did these weird paintings where Like Cows Fly and fish can walk go through the air and hand somebody bouquet of flowers and I
Definitely have those sorts of things I do have flying cows and you know I have a scene that’s narrated part of a scene that’s narrated from a bird that’s flying over the conversation and I don’t think it’s very weird it’s just a little bit imaginative and I had great fun with
That you know looking at this guy’s paintings and saying well I wonder if there’s a place this would fit in the story he’s much more fanciful and kind of weird than me and I’m pretty straight line thinking like a journalist so it’s good to have his imagination to kind of
Open my horizons did he help in the rebuilding or doing any of the stained glass for the cathedrals over in Europe one cathedral in particular yes he’s got glass around Europe and you know he also has glass in Jerusalem and he has a whole project for peace that he did for
Dog Harold plaza where the United Nations is in New York and I didn’t get to Jerusalem but I did see a lot of his other windows and they’re fantastic so the first windows that he had in the cathedral were in res which is a city in
Eastern France what I’m going to say 40 50 miles from the German border and the cathedral in my novel is modeled after that Cathedral and the windows that the men are working on to put in are the windows that chagal did installed there you begin this book with these three
Resistance Fighters and it’s a wonderful way to get started the war has basically ended it’s right at the very end and you have these three resistance Fighters together all I guess became friends as part of the resistance are they all Jewish I know Asher was Jewish are the
Other two Jewish also I think that they are but I’m not sure they’re there very briefly and it’s a beginning that I worried about because you introduced these characters and the reader attaches right away and two of them are gone inside of a chapter and it’s to make the
Point that Asher is really alone but you Ed them so beautifully I mean you get that first chapter friends if you read the first chapter you can ponder for days these questions for instance one of the very first questions that’s posed by these three gentlemen together is is
Victory the same as peace there it is tell us a little bit about that and how does that even tie in with the rest of the book then I think that the evidence that I saw as I was doing homework on that period of History I didn’t have
That sentence when I wrote the first draft you know I just started the story and that scene but as I was doing more research and learning about what it was like in France after the war you know if people are historian they know that the Marshall Plan which the United States
Created Secretary of State Marshall came up with this idea to give billions of dollars to nations of Europe to rebuild because the people were starving and because they were worried that they would turn to Communism as a way of solving their problems and so we gave millions of dollars away and really
Contribut to the Reconstruction of Europe but the money didn’t get there until 1949 so we had basically four years where the people these countries were starving like congratulations you won and now your cathedral’s destroyed and your homes are destroyed 1.5 million structures were destroyed Bridges schools hospitals churches homes
I mean you name it it was all flattened a million and a half structures and so you know and spectacular amount of work to be done and we think of like Victory and now let’s have a parade and it’s over and that’s just not the reality
That I found doing the research so that also happens to be true for the men that now there’s Victory but they’re a long way from peace they are full of grief over what they’ve lost and they are carrying some guilt for the things they
Had to do to win the war right you wrote another selection in that first beginning of the book where you write then you touched on it a minute ago every bridge in the nation every major road rail line gas line and power line every church school Factory or Hospital
Lies flattened in a nation so thoroughly shattered peace is a cruel fantasy that’s a wonderful wonderful sentence thank you you know I of course the written version is better than me just sounding off I should just pulled that sentence out you know well do you think today’s generation understands how
Devastating that war was in terms of obliteration of everything that was in that country you know it’s funny how your perspective changes I was born in 1960 and I thought of World War II as ancient ancient history might as well have been the Revolutionary War it was
So long before my time and now I realize I was born 15 years after it ended it’s not long at all and it was still very much in the culture it was certainly in my father who had bad dreams and had injuries from his service in the Pacific
Theater it informed my parents opinions about Vietnam as well and so I don’t know how much it’s a presence for a young generation now because War has become how do I want to say it it’s become abstract I had more emotional attachment to what was going on in
Vietnam with my older brothers being eligible for the draft than I did with our longest war ever in Afghanistan I never really had an understanding of what territories were at stake and what we were really doing there and so I feel like until Ukraine and now the Middle
East I felt like war was more of an abstraction it is certainly not an abstraction now when we look at what’s been done to you know the Russian method of warfare in Ukraine is to Simply destroy an entire town and everything in it and what’s going you know on the
Terrorism that has now resp by Hamas has created this path of destruction in response that is sure understandable and I’m not sure how well that will go for the civilians who are innocent then you know I think like suddenly it’s real and a friend of mine who works in a high
School was saying trying to convince kids to not use Tik Tock this week because of how graphic the violence is right right I think it’s becoming Vivid for this generation now yeah then I I love this this other thing because this other statement you wrote is just fantastic when they’re talking again
These three guys are talking this is the first chapter friends first chapter he said the right are the appeasers who signed the Armistice the left are the Rabel rousers and the resistance and everybody else is a communist were other countries like that was Belgium and everything else the same way you know I
Didn’t study all the other countries but I can tell you it was a real concern and there was a lot of propaganda and so on about whether or not going to the Soviet support was the right path for those countries and you know I think you can
Look at a lot of the governments of Western Europe now and they definitely have a more socialist bent if you look at the you know safety net programs and so on they have a more socialist bent than our country one of the things that I love about France and it’s
Inconvenient this can be is at all times someone is on strike about something and I think like as Americans sometimes people kind of mock that but I think it’s actually really healthy because what that is is democracy and people are making some noise and disagreeing and blocking the sidewalks and I think it’s
Terrific it’s a little less gential but if you want something that’s more efficient or quieter you can go get a dictator it’ll be nice and quiet I’d rather have the safety people at the airports on strike which happened the last time I was there where you know
There was no one to check your bag or put you through a scanner to get on your flight those people were on strike there’s still some of vestages of that social experiment a socialist experiment for good and bad right tax rates are high so I don’t presume to know whether
It’s a better or worse thing it was up for grabs mhm France would be a socialist country or a Democratic country and see you made us think right away you make us think about that issue and it’s act and I take it because I’m Italian I take it one step further how
Befuddled and Confused Italy was not just after the war there’s still befuddled and confused I don’t think Italy knows what they’re doing no me either but I still think that the woman who was the mayor of Rome is still my secret sweetheart she may not know it
But she was so smart and so beautiful it’s I just I think of her when I think of Rome it’s like there’s the Vatican and there’s her good anyway hey let’s talk a little bit about your lead character his name is Asher what’s his backstory and this is
Really his book if I’m not mistaken it is his story for sure so Asher was a small businessman he was a maker of very fine boots and they weren’t like the fanciest but they were he had a reputation of making things that really lasted because he had a way of putting
Layers on and so on and he is married to a girl he learned he knew in his childhood and fell in love with in his late teen years and they have a daughter Rachel and it is giving nothing away that’s told to the reader very early on
That he saw his wife and daughter killed early on in the war and in a particularly painful way and not that there’s a painless way but it’s particularly brutal and Vivid in his memory and so he joined the resistance and he was taking the risk
Doing that as a Jewish man but at that point he really probably couldn’t have escaped anyway and so he went into the woods and became an assassin for the resistance and it literally became a way that he stayed fed and it was feeding lots of things and it was helping him
Manage this unspeakable rage that he had about what happened and all of his family otherwise Got Loaded onto trains and carried away and never to be seen again and these assassinations are not like Sharpshooter 300 yards away or 500 yards away with a rifle these are very
Much retail personal his hands on the person’s throat him holding the the knife in a person’s belly kind of thing and so when the war ends he has damaged goods you know he’s full of guilt he’s full of grief he goes to where his home was it’s destroyed he goes to where his
Business was it’s destroyed as you say the beginning the first chapter he with the two friends that have stayed with him through the war they both decide they’re going to go make Mischief in different ways and leave him there and he is contemplating suicide because he
Has nothing left oh yes he also went to the synagogue where he worshiped as a boy and it’s been burned to the ground so he literally has nothing and he goes down to the water’s edge to drown himself because the village he grew up in is on the English Channel and there’s
A woman there who convinces him not to do that but to go to a place where good things are happening and he wanders and wanders slowly kind of starving himself to death until he arrives at the Chateau where where he gets a meal and then a
Job and then another meal and then a roof over his head and then it he remembers in his childhood that he used to draw a lot and he starts draw designing stained glass windows and he has a knack Fort maybe even a talent Fort and turns out that he’s actually a
Spectacular artist and the emotional depth that he has because of his losses and pain mean that he transforms the art of St stain glass windows and that was almost what led me to mark shagala because he totally changed the rules about what a window could be and do and
Say and contained Asher goes to the town of clovid that’s a fictional town but where in France would you place that so that is the cathedral in R is where I’m talking about and that Cathedral is in honor of St clovid clovid it’s based on that town and the
River on that town and the geography of that town and the Cathedral of that town the ways that it was destroyed and rebuilt and where the windows were put in that all came from the actual cathedral in r one of the things I find interesting is that he’s ready to drown
Himself and a lady and a dog show up which we talked about and she convinces him to go to clid and when he turns around she’s gone and this happens numerous times when he’s lost somebody comes out of nowhere and tells him where to go or how to get there there a little
Bit of mysticism in this book you’re asking about one of my secrets here’s the thing okay the significant thing about this old woman do you remember what makes him notice her so much oh first of all she had a dog that’s it she had a dog because the Germans
Confiscated all the dogs because they didn’t want to worry about them or you know I don’t know if they were for food what it was but they they caught and killed all the dogs and this woman has a dog and it’s an old dog which means it
Lived through the war okay and then he turns around and she’s gone when’s the next time that we see a dog I think it was a little girl I’m not sure but there is somebody kicking a ball and there’s a dog there too there two boys who are
Playing with the ball and their dog he’s in the town of clid but he can’t find the cathedral and they roll the ball down the hill and when he chases the ball so it won’t go in the gutter he sees the cathedral and he brings the
Ball back up and they’re gone when’s the next time that we see a dog I think he’s going to see the lady in he’s going to Mar’s house for dinner for the first time and he get it’s a little bit lost and along comes a girl on a bicycle with
A dog and they show him the way to go and then they’re gone and then one there’s one more time that there’s a dog do you remember when that is I don’t think I remember that fourth time I’m sorry the fork in the road the on the
Next to last page and the little girl gives them directions and that time the dog goes with them and this isn’t a mystical or religious book so I’m not going to use the word Angels but let’s just say that not all angels have two feet some might have four and so when
The dog goes with him now he has moved into a different category because of what he’s gone to do at the end this is they wrote off into the sunset ending but I want them to ride off with a particular Grace I did pretty good you
Could tell I read the book exactly qu very good well by oh my oh my oh boy oh boy did this remaking and rebuilding of the cathedral and the use of the stained glass did that start right after the war or was there a gap of a few years before
They this actually started developing the glass it was some years a little bit of a yarn about that you know it was an exertion for me to get to that Cathedral I first applied to and was accepted to live in an artist’s Colony about 2 hours
Hour and a half train rid south of that town and which was a fantastic place and I wrote about a third of the book at that artist Colony fantastic experience to live in France rural Countryside all that at any rate it also was like getting myself there and the cheapest
Flight from Vermont actually was to fly through Iceland have like a night in the airport in Iceland and and then I got to Rance and the hotel reservation was screwed up so I was really away from everything said the point being it was a big exertion when I finally got to
Cathedral you know the Cornerstone says that they started building this place in the year 818 then it’s you know I don’t know maybe 200 yard long and 150 ft ceilings and it’s this incredible holy place and I got there and I wanted to run to the
Back to see the shagal windows I mean I have like books about those windows I have pictures of those windows that are over the window in front of my desk right now here in my office you know like I know those windows but I’m not
GNA run it’s like I finally got here I’m just going to savor it and so I went clockwise around the cathedral and went down the left-and side and there are these plaques and it turns out at the end of the war this was the first place where the government officials of France
Sat down with the government officials of Germany to begin a process they called Repros we’re going to reestablish relationships they’ve got 180 miles of shared border they’re people going back and forth like how are we going to relate to one another now and I got different versions of this story but I’m
Going to repeat the one that I like best I think it’s accurate but any rate so they have like a prayer and then they’re going to start negotiations about how are we going to rebuild our countries and the head of the German delegation says we would like the people of Germany
To speak first and the French are like no way bud you are not speaking first and the guy came around in front of the desks you know they’re on opposite sides of this room and this huge church and and he gets down on his knees and says
We beg the opportunity to speak first and the French say no it’s our first concession and we’ll remember and then he says you know this is a cathedral where France crowned its Kings and it had some of the best stained glass windows in the world and now all
Of those openings are covered with boards and we’re using lamps and chandeliers to light our work here today because of that and so we invite the people of France to go find the greatest stained glass window makers on Earth to replace these boards with beautiful
Religious art and it will be paid for by the people of Germany wow and the window that they put in were by Mark shagal and so not only am I sitting there thinking I’ve got a novel but I’m also thinking today Germany and France have the same currency they both belong
To the European Union if Germany and France can menend from their divisions what’s possible for America exactly correct exactly correct wow I like that version of the story a lot that’s good that’s tremendous one scene which popped to my mind as we were just talking here you have a gentleman
Playing I think it was a violin in the middle of the streets in one area and you had one group of partisans on one side and one group of partisans on the other side and was this a factual thing that you had written about this connects
With what I said a little bit ago that when I had seen the painting that chagal did of the man playing his violin on top of the building I like I’m going to have a Fiddler on the Roof scene I’ve got to have a Fiddler on the Roof scene happen
Sometime in this book and then I thought how can I also have it show the division among the people and so I thought perfect I’ll have a you know there’s all kinds of weird Street intersections in these old old old you know thousand year old villages so he’s going to be up on
The roof and one side of the roof there’s like the pro communist crowd and on the other side of the roof there’s a pro democracy crowd and he’s playing to them both equally so that they’re both satisfied and I have him like doing a lot of dancing up there because I
Actually believe anyone who wants to cater to both groups is going to have to do some pretty fancy footwork and then I remembered from childhood that song that has a call and response song aloette and so he gets the two sides singing you know back and forth doing aloette with
Each other because he’s an Entertainer and he wants to them to put money in the Hat and he thinks he’s got them bridg and then it starts to rain and everyone leaves including him this story that works on a couple level it’s definitely influenced by shagal as I said he’s not
In this scene but it’s influenced by him and it is what was going on in that time and it is how it reflects on today’s time and so I’m trying to work at a couple of levels there the most important thing is it has to be a
Compelling story and then if I can put layers in then all the better but so that’s where that scene came from reminds me so much of the book The chalis of Saro I don’t know if you ever read that book where a gentleman goes out every day at
Noon and plays his cello in the middle of the war torn city yes I remember when that was going on and how moving that was did he survive that war yes you know yes uhuh good yeah that’s what they say he did yeah but that was a wonderful
Book reminded me so much about that cuz he’s doing the same thing just playing for everybody on both sides and he doesn’t care he’s going to try to bring a little bit of peace and a little bit of Sanity to this whole thing you know it’s a similar sort of thing and there’s
A statue to this man when the Scots came ashore on D-Day the first person off of their boat was a bagpiper and you know those things are loud and he was unarmed carrying bag pipes walking up that beach while there’s just Slaughter happening all around him and almost all of the
Germans had never heard a bag pipe before and they were terrified yeah and he survived and the captured that beach and there is now a big statue of a man in a kilt with bag pipes right next to the beach in aramos wow that’s great you got a lot of interesting Side characters
In this all of whom also I think are damaged to one way or the other one gentleman won’t speak another person is always sarcastic tell a little bit about those few characters please okay well the first thing is that I thought it was important in terms of the emotional
Stakes for the characters in this book that every one of them is damaged by the war every single character in this book is damaged by the war only one has a physical injury minor character he’s got a bad leg everyone else is damaged emotionally and I thought about each of
Them and there’s the one who never speaks and I didn’t know in the beginning why he doesn’t speak but it turns out it’s because his voice would give him away and I don’t want to say any more than that but he has his reason there’s another man who never tells
Anyone his name and I decided at the beginning of the book I was not going to give that to the reader you do not get to know his name at the end and it’s because his name is associated with an act of great cowardice we do learn what
The Act was yes but we don’t get his name and so on right down the line that each of them has in addition their own background and they all have different backgrounds you know some are really educated some are not some are political or military some are not but they each
Have different skills and one guy is really good at blowing glass and another guy is really good at coloring it and another guy is really good at feeding the kils and another guy you know I mean everyone has their strengths and so I felt like that’s kind of where we are
Right now I don’t see any political or cultural unifying force I see a lot of really divided people and they each are damaged all sides are damaged and all sides have something to offer to the solution so a very important moment in the novel when two men find out that
They’re in love with the same woman and that she’s been with them both and she’s completely Unapologetic and they’re about to just have the fight of all time and she says before you kill each other before you kill each other keep in mind what you have built together already and
Imagine what you could continue to build if you continue to work together and that leads them rather than fighting into what I think is really kind of an uplifting way that to go forward with their lives and where the novel is the most hopeful I want to like make that a
Headline like just look at what you’ve built America and think of what you could build if you worked together and this book is you know it’s not a polemic it’s not like here’s the recipe for a better America it’s not that it’s a story about people recovering from World
War II but I think that there are ways it’s similar MH yep very true I remember at one point they actually went into the town and they saw a couple build buildings that were rebuilt but that was it and now Asher is confused how did these buildings get rebuilt so quickly
And where do they get the money where did they come from how did those few first few buildings get rebuilt the thing about R is it’s actually the political Center and economic center of the Champagne region so of course when I was AR doing my research on the
Cathedral I felt it was imperative as a thorough journalist and reporter that I get the full experience there BL some people are willing to suffer for their art and so there enough champagne companies I did I did suffer a little but any rate they they were sort of like
If you owned the factory in some towns or you owned the coal mine in West Virginia they had a kind of economic domination and so that was what led the rebuilding because you know what happens is Asher sees these buildings and he starts to get all optimistic and they’re like n it’s going
To be harder than that and it’s a general way of saying like there’s no no immediate happy ending rebuilding a nation takes years and years years and years and there are a couple places that France chose not to rebuild on purpose and it’s not dissimilar to the Germans choosing to maintain the concentration
Camps not aave them over but keep them as historical memory so like if you go to Normandy where the D-Day invasion happened the bomb craters are still there the German pill boxes are still there the ships that were sunk in the harbor are rusting right there in the
Water that kind of thing still there wow one thing we learn a lot about in this book is how to make glass yes where did you get all your background in glass blowing and glass making I spent a lot of time with two organizations one is a guy named Larry
Rebecky he is a world-class stained glass window maker and you know if a church in the state of Vermont or Beyond needs a new window or a window gets broken or something he’s the guy who does that and he also makes him for high-end homes and stuff like that and
He’s kind of a kogin and he was very very helpful I learned a ton from him he’s really patient and he gave me books on stained glass and so on and then the really fun part was I went to this company called AO glass letter a letter
O glass also in Burlington Vermont and these folks make vases and pictures and wine glasses and cocktail glasses and all that sort of stuff and Christmas decorations all that sort of stuff but they also make high art and in fact when I was doing my research there they were
Making 10,000 kind of frosted globes for the next sculpture by myin the woman who designed the Vietnam memorial wall so they’re doing like really high-end art and I come in there I’m gray-haired I’m kind of preppy I got a notebook I’m asking all these questions and Riz
Things down and there a point where they’re like okay enough of that and they take away my notebook and pen and it’s like buddy you’re blowing glass right now and what I can tell you about my glass blowing is I’m awful I’m terrible like they were laughing they’d
Never seen any worse at it but at the end of the little project that I was doing with them there was a little glob left and one of the guys kind of tapped it on a table and then handed me some kind of tweezers that were very long so
I’d be away from the Heat and he’d say pinch pinch pinch while he turned this glob and lo and behold I’d made a glass flow and right then was when I got the idea for the glass flow that I put into the novel and for the people who haven’t
Read the book yet it is somewhat of a symbol of love and it’s not a huge symbol in the book but it sort of matters at the the end and in fact instead of it saying the end at the End of This Book I have a drawing of a glass
Flower in a vase and when I’ve been on tour I’ve been giving away one glass flour at every event on tour which I made there and part of the fun of it is look you know if you let’s say you make a nice globe and I couldn’t do it I
Could not make one I tried I tried I could not make one but let’s say you’re making one and it starts to droop a little bit off the pipe before you’ve got it on the cooling pad do you catch it no right it’s 1700° and if it falls and shatters on the
Floor do you sweep it up no it will set your broom on fire and I think about that kind of Hazard as being part of how you do your art and I think about like for me it’s like oh no my laptop battery ran out you know oh no I’m out of
Printer ink like it’s just so tame and so I actually liked it’s really hot in these places you sweat a lot and kind of stink when you’re doing it and everyone is so into concentrating on what they’re doing doing so focused and it was great
Great fun and so I you know I had actually have my book launch there rather than at a bookstore that was a great part of in addition to reading books and looking at lots of stained glass windows the actual Hands-On stuff was a blast before we go I want to ask
You a question about World War II fiction and what your thought is about is it trending downwards or are we going to see new fiction sort of like yours it’s not just so much about the Holocaust and ALS schwitz but about other aspects that we don’t get every
Day here in America and learning about World War II where do you see a fiction great question and I think a lot of editors and writers are trying to sort that out right now I sense that there’s some fatigue in people reading World War II stories a couple times people said
I’ve stopped reading World War II but I wanted to read this book of yours CU I’ve liked others my next book is not a World War II book it’s set in contemporary times that’ll be out in February of 2025 here’s the thing you know Hollywood has said for the last 20
Years or more what the public wants is a story about a hero who’s going to save everyone a superhero is going to save everyone and we don’t have to do much except get out of the way of the falling cars but the heroes are going to take
Care of it for us and I would say that that’s what Hollywood has done it’s made them billions of dollars but I think that in the world of books there aren’t superheroes it’s much more ordinary people who get caught up in something much larger than themselves and how they
Rise to the occasion the main character of The Glass Shau is a guy who builds boots he makes nice boots and everyone around him similar kind of modest lives and yet they must rise to the challenge of World War II I think those stories are indelible and they will last and
Matter but I think that they’re going to need different settings and we’re going need to look at different periods in time when right and wrong are less kind of easy to see when there’s more gray I think there’s going to be Evolution I still have another World War II book
That I want to write very much it’s a great epic story but I think that like a 900 page World War II book right now it’s not going to get the same attention as it would have 15 years ago I think even though there are people that are
Writing fresh things and there’s been some great books written I think the readers will want to look in other directions I have a friend who’s just finished up a Civil War Book for example and very eager to read that as Chris Bo jellan has that coming oh it does he I
Didn’t know that if you haven’t he’s a great guy good good friend very very like the most generous friend I’ve ever had such a good guy and he’s got a book coming out in March and then the next one is going to be the Civil War one
That’s what he’s working on now but I think that there’s other stories to be told and what I tried to do with this one was make it post-war you know there are no battles in this book there’s memories and there’s damage to be recovered from but and I think if
There’s a great great story then people will still turn to it and I also think I don’t want a superhero story I’m totally bored with a superhero story have been for a long time so we got to find new ways and by the way it also means we
Need to talk about female models of heroism we’ve had 5,000 years of literature looking at male models of heroism it’s why I always have really strong female characters often they’re my narrators because I think there’s a lot still to be examined there right it
Drives me nuts when I go and I look for these books and I be honest I get them on net Galley and other locations and and they’ll say women’s fiction you know it yeah a woman’s the head of is about her point of view but it’s not
A woman’s fiction book and I talked to a lot of those L and they themselves agree yeah it’s not a woman’s fiction book it’s it’s historical fiction it’s a book about our history book about what women were doing at that time and you’re exactly correct the more and more we’re
Seeing the women’s place in history shining forth yes and I think when it really matters when you stop seeing books titled the Pilot’s Wife The Soldier’s daughter you know but instead it just becomes like my next book is titled the finder the finder is a woman she’s my favorite character I ever wrote
And it’s just the finder it’s not the finder’s wife okay you know there’s room for agency and growth in that for sure good so that’s what you’re working on you’re just about done with that book or have you sent that in already to your publisher I’m expecting any day to get
It back from my editor for the revision that it will definitely need and I really trust her so I’m looking forward to her feedback with some nervousness but again I’m not in black and white on this I’m about ordinary folks being an issue bigger than themselves here and
Now I really enjoy writing something it’s contemporary one of the things that’s difficult is in my history writing historical fiction writing there are things that people don’t know and they can’t go find out and there are also times that people need to communicate and they can’t reach each
Other or a letter takes two weeks to arrive things like that and when you write in the present somebody wants to know something they take out the encyclopedia in their pocket right and if somebody wants to communicate with somebody they got nine different ways they can reach them and that really
Changed changes the tempo of things because I also think just as in real life when somebody picks up their phone and starts engaging with it if you’re next to them and they just became boring likewise in a book you can have somebody take out you know open their laptop or
Start working away on their phone without the story just dying so accounting for those things is a good like challenge of craft and making the story Move Along that’s great well it sounds like you had a lot of good stuff coming I appreciate it you had great
Books before and friends I’m going to tell you what this is one fine author the glass Chateau it is a book that will stay with me forever and ever I love this book and I read this book around three or four months ago I still
Remember all yeah I read it well yeah I well I do my research well in advance that’s great but do you remember the first chapter and you remember the dogs I’m impressed really great yeah this how much it stayed with me Stephen it’s just stayed with me it’s a great book Stephen
Thank you so much for coming on today the books and looks I’m so glad and I look forward to your next book and hopefully we can have you back then again I’d love it and thanks for having me on today real pleasure all right very good friends we’ll be right
Back again thanks so much Stephen for being with us we really appreciate you coming on and giving us this wonderful view of uh healing after World War II and all the difficulties that so many people had after that horrible horrible War over there in Europe and you know
That brings me to what I’m looking at and what I’m looking at is World War II novels and if you’ve noticed this year we have had a lot of post-world War II novels we had a bakery in Paris we’ve had under the Java Moon and now we’ve had the glass
Chateau and each of these books I chose because they are different they are unique now I don’t want to sit there and denigrate the books that have come out or the topics which they have written about because there’s a very interesting novels about that but the time has come
That we are looking for some other type of World War II novels so what do we have a lady on a bakery in Paris that main character helped feed the the poor starving people after World War II that’s a story you don’t hear about we then went under the Java Moon with
Heather Moore we learned about the Dutch East Indies P camps and the horrors they went through you never heard about that that’s never been written about and now we have the glass chatau with Steven Kernan again a look at healing question about what is peace after Victory how do
You rebuild a country so totally devastated these are all books that are out there novels about World War II and I encourage each and every one of you to not just look at these three books and obviously I would love for you to read them all but what I want you like to
Have you do is is keep searching for non-traditional books about that war because they’re out there and there are authors who are running really fine books about this I know we got to look a little bit harder because you know the book industry wants to keep pushing the
Same type of book and you know what I’ve read those I don’t need to keep reading them anymore so anyway that’s what I’m looking at World War II novels and the fact that we’re dealing with the non-traditional type novel here on books and looks and I think you’re really
Going to enjoy this if you give him a chance anyway on behalf of views on books.com on behalf of podcast studiox and for books and looks this is bla Des sis saying may all your leaves be pages in a Book
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