Interview with Cory Doctorow. Transformative experiences and some really cool Young Adult novels.

I’ve talked about the ancestral manse. As you can see from above (pay no attention to the stray urchins clowning around) it is a barn. It is, in fact, The Barn, the third child and major player of my childhood, my father’s very largest art project. I always rather took it for granted; I knew that no one else of my acquaintance had a rope hammock, rope ladder, and trapeze in their front hallways, and that very few people I knew had a problem with bats in the house (contrary to folklore, bats do not require belfries; a nice 40 foot ceiling will do just fine). But it wasn’t until I owned the place and was responsible for its care and upkeep that I began to understand how eccentric it really is.

Like that stone wall? That’s the chimney. When I was a small kid and the Barn still had chancy floors and a high rodent population, an ancient, wizened Italian stonemason laid out all those stones (three floors’ worth, ten feet deep) in the meadow, and would send one of his burly assistants down to bring them up one by one (”Bruno. Go down, get that nice beige stone, fourth row up, third in”) and built the damned thing by hand. Four fireplaces. My father used to keep the place heated largely by woodfire, but given that the livingroom is essentially a cube 45 feet by 45 feet by 45 feet, it wasn’t until the room was finally insulated (by which time I was in college) that you didn’t have to wear a winter coat in the room for about five months of the year.

This is the front hall. The hammock used to hang right across it (the rugs and chairs are additions by my former tenants), with the trapeze only a few feet away, hanging from the ridgepole. The boards of the floor are the originals–kicked and trod on by generations of cattle and horses. It’s a beautiful floor, perfect for stubbing your toe in the middle of the night. That window at the end of the hall used to go all the way to the floor, and could actually slide to the left into the garage, making the whole hallway open onto the terrace. Perfect for parties and mosquitos.

The windows in the background are the same windows you saw in that first photo (same damned urchin, too. Place is lousy with them). All sorts of odd artsy bits and pieces of stuff. Just above the scythe hanging on the wall there’s a stained glass window–an abstract made up of 12″ squares of pastel glass, designed by my father. The lovely hardwood floors are a death trap for scampering dogs; we’re lucky no dog ever shot straight out that second-floor window onto an apple tree.

When I was in college, my father added the greenhouse to one side of the house. It’s got passive solar heating columns (essentially 12 foot tall plastic cylinders filled with by-dyed water) which, over the years, began to collect fascinating fungal glorp. One of the more hazardous home-maintenance things I’ve ever had to do was to tip each of the columns over so I could scrub out the grunge and refill the things with water. If you look at the upper row of windows on the right side, that is where my room was. The Barn is actually two barns built at right-angles to each other; the one on the right is about 200 years old; the one on the left is about 125 years old. The differences in construction are marked: the older barn has posts and beams fixed in with big wooden pegs; the newer barn uses long hand-made nails.
It’s a wonderful house. I hated living there as a teenager, but I never lost sight of how cool it was as a structure. Even with the bats.