December 26, 2009
Saturday
The Feast of Stephen

The novel I am working on takes place over a week in the life of a family in crisis. The week begins on Christmas Eve with the sudden death of the main character’s niece, and ends on New Year’s Eve with her funeral. In the prologue we see Megan in her last phone conversation before the aneurysm in her brain explodes. She is talking to her boyfriend, who has gone to spend Christmas with his family. He says he’ll be back on the Feast of Stephen. I have been surprised at how many workshop readers, including a member of the religion department at Emory University, have indicated that they don’t get the reference.

A college instructor, the one who gave me “The Silken Tent” as a metaphor for myself but also discouraged my writing, once told me that he was “astonished” at my “lack of general knowledge.” I was barely 21 then, and I believed his assessment of me as a small-town girl with little potential. I think I assumed that if I knew something, then it was probably common knowledge that any ninny ought to possess.

In any case, the phrase “the Feast of Stephen” should probably be familiar to those who keep Christmas, even if they don’t know who Stephen is. His feast day is the day good King Wenceslas looked out and beheld the snow deep and crisp and even and the moon shining and the frost cruel and a poor man gathering winter fu-u-el (sing with me!). Stephen is venerated as a saint by the Roman Catholic, the Anglican, the Lutheran, and the Eastern Orthodox churches. He was martyred not long after Christ’s death in an incident incited by Saul of Tarsus, who would become Saint Paul. The Episcopal cathedral in Harrisburg is named for Stephen. He was pictured in the Sunday missal I received as a Confirmation gift at the moment of his death by stoning. For a long time I confused him with Saint Sebastian, who was martyred 250 years later by being shot with arrows. He was also pictured in my missal. Such are the images that abide.

My father’s birthday was the Feast of Stephen. At Christmas of my first year of college I had a boyfriend named Stephen, whose father was also Stephen. My boyfriend’s family had my family over to dinner on the day after Christmas, and the two Stephens and my father raised a glass of wine to each other. The relationship ended awkwardly. There was an attempt on his part about ten years later to pick it up again, but nothing came of it. When we saw each other at a class reunion about five years ago we had very little to say to each other, and that Feast of Stephen gathering almost forty-five years ago remains the single enduring memory of the years that we knew each other.

I start my new year on the Feast of Stephen. According to the link below, it seems I began this practice in 1999. It’s the day I go back to work, having suspended all creative work except Holidailies at Thanksgiving. I thought I could keep that from happenening this year. After all, when I was in the classroom I eschewed Christmas-themed word searches and other time fillers and addressed whatever American author was in the rotation, usually Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. But I haven’t fallen into fiction since about December 4, when I nearly broke my ankle. I haven’t even read any fiction in about two weeks.

The Feast of Stephen is a Saturday this year. Tomorrow, Sunday, I am spending with a friend I see all too little of. We’ll have lunch, and exchange gifts, and then I’m going to ask him to cross the water with me and carry my heavy tub of fiction fragments up to my Aerie, that place I have not even visited much since the middle of December. We’ll also be stopping at Staples to get me an ergonomic desk chair that won’t leave me stiff and uncomfortable after only an hour. The chair I’ve been using, a spectacular Stickley piece with a hand-carved inlay, serves well for elegant dining (probably) but not so much for what Ron Carlson advises is the only way to approach this business of fiction — staying in the chair. My friend will carry that up for me too, and we’ll sit together, two writers who love and support and encourage each other in everything we do, and talk about what moves us and engages us and carries us forward into the new year.

And Monday morning, with that energy still lingering in my house and my studio and in the air that I breathe, I will peel the cover off that tub, draw out the folder with the material that needs to be revisited, reshaped, and reenvisioned by March 1, and begin again.

From the Archives
December 26, 2004 – Fin de L’Annee: . . .  in December [of 1999] I took up the habit of . . . . starting a new volume of [my private paper journal] on The Feast of Stephen. That was my father’s birthday. I remember my parents’ birthdays more now that they’re gone than I did when they were around to be told, glad you’re here, the whole reason we celebrate birthdays anyway. My year-end letter, the thing I send instead of a Christmas card, is always dated on this day, if not mailed until maybe Epiphany. Last year I didn’t even write one. I don’t remember now why.

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