“Elijah’s Funeral”: The story behind the story

I worked a long time on this story to make sure I got it absolutely right. I think maybe I did. The setting of the story is completely real. The Los Angeles Catholic Worker, Hennessy House and the Hippie Kitchen are all real places/institutions in Skid Row and Boyle Heights and were where I spent a lot of time in the 90s and again in the 00s. That said, I feel obligated to repeat Evelyn Waugh’s disclaimer at the beginning of Brideshead Revisited: 

I am not I. Thou art not he or she. They are not they.

All the characters in the story, are fictional with the small exception of the priest presiding at the mass burial of the unclaimed dead at the county cemetery—that’s a friend of mine, Father Chris Ponnet, who organizes the event. It seems to have grown a bit since I originally researched it for an early draft of this story 17 years ago. Sadly, Chris died earlier this month during heart surgery and the world is much poorer for his absence.

I stole the opening line from the late Kieran Prather, something he said when he served as the lay presider at a Mass at the Los Angeles Catholic Worker in the mid-90s. I hope he’ll forgive me this small sin, but his line about a guest at Hennessy House was one that struck me as pure poetry and I’ve been trying to write the story that follows it for the last 30 years. I think I may have finally done his words justice.

This piece actually was accepted twice, with Adam Davis, the editor of The Green Hills Literary Lantern writing:

A very interesting piece. One seldom encounters serious religious engagement in contemporary fiction except in the course of proselytization, or as a punching bag. In the former case, it’s usually a very different kind of Christianity, and in the latter, a caricature. So here are credible people with real lives; what’s reported here tracks pretty well with what I know of the Catholic Worker movement. This is quite refreshing, and we’d be pleased to run it in the farewell issue.

Alas, it was not to appear there, but instead in the pages of the Santa Monica Review, which was early on one of my bucket list publications for my work to appear in (it only took 18 years of trying to finally succeed).

You should definitely order a copy of this issue, this is a real banger of a story.

Thanks to Lori Barrett, Davy McNell, Laura Nelson, Dan Portincaso and Kate Prior for their feedback on this story in workshop.