Overview

In Stained Glass a 50s-something reporter, who has been jaded by overexposure to media hype and is cynical about every aspect of his wretched life, is given an assignment by his aging mother to complete the memoir of his great-great-grandfather Christopher Dryden. In the early 1870s Christopher had been sent on a mission to the boisterous Gold Rush town of Barkerville, BC, where a fund-raising campaign to install a stained glass window behind the alter of St. Saviour's Anglican Church (flickr image at right by jmegjmeg) turned into a heated controversy when it was revealed that the anonymous donor, who was covering most of the cost for the painted glass, was none other than the owner of the town's most notorious brothel...

Sunday, January 10, 2010

Faith, Love and Survival

Young Anglican priest Christopher Dryden accepts a mission to the rough and tumble Gold Rush town of Barkerville in BC's Cariboo country, where he discovers faith, love and the meaning of survival on the wild frontier.

That's the 'working theme' of Stained Glass, and the tensions between those three motivating forces will determines the directions of the story.

At the outset Christopher feels his staunch upbringing and training as an Anglican priest have given him a pretty good grasp of what Faith, Love and Survival mean. He knows his is a somewhat abstract formulation of the fundamentals, and is keen to test his religious and social theories in the real world, but he has no doubt they will stand up even in the harshest of environments.

Confronted with the surreal hardships and temptations of a Gold Rush town on the fringe of 'civilization', however, he struggles to uphold his Victorian values and hang on to his sanity.
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