A bunch of writers started hanging out in a virtual treehouse when the pandemic hit and now don't want to leave.
(I’m just back from New Orleans and the World Fantasy Convention, about which more anon… in the meantime, I’m jet-lagged and cannot brain, so here is a Raised in a Barn story from long ago…)
Part of the reason my father wanted to own a Barn was so that he could experiment with it. Try things out. Like trapezes. Or gardens. Some of his experiments worked brilliantly; some of them, not so much. One of the more interesting ones was a floor treatment, if that’s what you could call it. Dad cut one-inch slices of 2x4s to use as tiles in the front entry room, what we called the tack room (in the days when the Barn was a working barn, it was where various animal-related gear had been stored). It was a good experiment, a sort of prototype. Dad had big plans, see. For the kitchen.
The kitchen, as I have said elsewhere, was big: maybe 30 feet by 40 feet. And Dad wanted to use blocks for the flooring. But not 2×4 slices. Dad ordered a huge number of slightly smaller wooden blocks–3″ x 1 1/2″ x 3/4″ deep–made of oak, stained a dark brown and chemically treated to be fire retardant. When the blocks arrived we “seasoned” them–which is to say, stored them in huge stacks in the living room for months, until the chemical smell of the blocks gentled a little. Dad had ordered 40,000 of them, so even in tidy stacks it was a lot of wood.
When the wood was adequately cured, Dad prepped the floor by laying down long 1 x 1 inch strips of pine in a 3 foot grid, so the floor looked as though it was a vast checkerboard. Then the tubs of dull tan flooring cement came out, and that stuff smelled far worse than the blocks had at any time (I sometimes wonder how many brain cells the fumes cost us). Then, square by square, Dad laid the floor. It was a special treat if you got to lay a couple of rows of blocks (at least Dad thought it was a special treat, as many years later he used to offer me the treat of trimming his beard). So the floor got laid in tidy squares of dark oak. tightly packed together. Eventually he planned to seal them with a coat or three of polyurethane, but first he wanted the floor to cure–which I took to mean, let the smell of blocks-and-cement fade.
That was in September. We were still living in New York and going up to the country on weekends. In wintertime one of the last things we did before we left the Barn every weekend was to drain the pipes in case of a freeze. When water freezes it increases in volume, and water in pipes will burst the pipes and, when the water thaws, flood your house. But it wasn’t winter yet. No need to drain the pipes until December, at the earliest.
You see where this is going, right? A freeze hit in early November. We drove up as usual one Friday night. Dad got out of the car to turn on the lights and stopped dead in the doorway, causing one of those three-car pileups as Mom, my brother and I slammed into him. We looked, and as we were looking Dad stepped carefully into the room and sat down on the stairs. I don’t think he was crying, but he must have wanted to.
I’ve calculated that Dad used 38,400 blocks, give or take. The water from the broken pipe had flooded the entire kitchen floor; the unsealed blocks soaked up the water, swelled, and popped. The whole floor was a sea of warped blocks in mounds and piles. The work of that weekend became all about pulling up the few remaining cemented blocks and clearing up the swollen, sodden, warped remains of the kitchen floor.
The next week Dad started planning the new kitchen floor. This time he’d use flagstones. It required pouring cement reinforcing columns in the basement to handle the weight, but by God, that floor was going to be water resistant. What did we do with all the ruined blocks? Even when they dried out sufficiently, we couldn’t burn them (that pesky fire-retardant treatment). Most of them had been warped beyond the point where you could use them for much (although Dad did build a handsome chessboard out of some). Some were toted off to the dump, but for years after the great block debacle blocks remained, here and there; I think Dad hoped he’d find a use for them. Waste not, want not.
I love learning how to do stuff. When I was a kid I had weaving lessons the way that my peers had piano or violin lessons. I taught myself to sew when I was a teenager. Taught myself to knit. And when I see a recipe for something I’ve never made — particularly if it’s a fairly basic thing (like cheese) or a really complex thing (baklava! beef Wellington!) my thumbs start twitching. It’s not that I need home made cheese — I’m pretty much the only cheese eater in my house — but the urge to know how to do it is nearly overwhelming.
This is the reason I have found myself doing things as foolish as refinishing my own hardwood floors or stripping wall paper: it’s not that I’m an insane DIY-er; I’m learning the process (also learning that I never want to do it again). By the same token, I’ve taken stage combat and fencing classes (never real martial arts, mind you, but I can use a quarterstaff, a rapier, a broadsword, or pretend to beat you to a pulp) so I’d know. And don’t get me started on assembling Ikea furniture. It’s like crack: look! This goes there! Cool!
What licenses me to do these things? Being a writer. A few months ago I was talking to a group of Girl Scouts about my career, and someone asked me what the best part of being a writer was. I don’t know what the girls were expecting, but when I said “research!” they looked as if I’d said “spinach!” But other than being a scientist or a beta tester, I know of no other profession that encourages — requires — that I find out how things work. That can mean plumbing the depths of biology or astronomy, or reading (as I currently am) about women’s legal status in medieval Italy. It can mean reading, or it can mean, for me, getting out a hammer and nails and building a chair, just to see if I can, and so I’ll know the smell and the noises and the feel of wood under my hands.
In the end, writing is all about the process too. With each project, book or story, I find out different things about how I write and what I –and the project– need. Getting to learn new processes is just an extra! added! bonus!
©2011 This post was originally published on the Book View Café Blog
I was a theatre major. Not writing, not history, none of the things that might have proved useful in my then-unthought-of career as a writer. I hoped to act (but unfortunately, was not particularly talented in that arena, and not conventionally adorable enough for my lack of talent to be overlooked) but what it turned out I was really good at was stage management. Stage management includes keeping track of all the people and things that go into a production: the schedules, the movement of actors on stage, very often the lighting and props and sound cues. In many of the cases where I was stage manager, it also meant keeping track of the director’s unspoken needs, the personal lives of performers, and how all the bits and pieces go from point A to point B (in one production of Moonchildren this included figuring out how to remove 7 dozen glass milk bottles from the set in a 60-second scene blackout).
It turns out that my secret superpower is cat-herding. Continue reading “The Virtues of an Audience”…
In 1990, when I was 4+ months pregnant with my older daughter, my husband and I went to Disney World. Our reasoning was that this might be our last opportunity to act like the irresponsible kids we were (even in our 30s) rather than the responsible parental figures we were about to become. This showed how much we knew about parenthood, but it was still a good trip. While we were there, we learned that there was going to be a shuttle launch from the Kennedy Space Center at Oh-God-Too-Early AM the next day, and immediately decided we had to drive there from Orlando and see the launch.
The drive seemed to take forever, although it’s only about 60 miles. I think we left Orlando at 4am, and got to Cape Canaveral closer to 6am than our planned 5am. Then we had to find out where to go. Fortunately, there were signs–most of them hand-drawn by other people who were as weird about this stuff as we are. We were deep in unknown territory, and while you can’t drive through Orlando without being pointed to every possible entertainment, Port Canaveral–or the town on the far side of the Banana River from which your basic drop-in-tourists viewed launches–provided a lot less guidance for your wandering NASA fan. But we found a place where many cars were parked, and pulled over and walked across what I remember as a fairly long, slightly swampy trail to a field where there were perhaps 60 or 70 other people standing around, attention on the distance, where the shuttle and gantry gleamed fitfully in the morning light.
Then what?
We waited. For a while. And another while. Continue reading “The Day the Shuttle Didn’t Fly”…
I was a participant in the COSMOS trial (it was fun!) examining possible benefits for older folks from cocoa flavonoids and an ordinary multivitamin (they used Centrum Silver). While the cocoa extract had no effect on cognition, the multivitamin did–it actually improved cognition! (Cardiovascular events and cancer results are reported elsewhere). Here’s the summary:
Vitamins, minerals, and other bioactives in foods are important for normal brain function, and deficiencies in older adults may increase risk for cognitive decline. Dietary supplements are often recommended for cognitive protection, but supporting evidence is mixed. COSMOS investigators partnered with colleagues at Wake Forest University to test whether daily use of cocoa extract or a multivitamin for 3 years can reduce the risk of cognitive decline. The COSMOS-Mind sub-study enrolled 2,262 COSMOS participants aged 65 and older who completed annual telephone interviews to assess memory and thinking abilities. The investigators found that cocoa extract did not affect cognition. On the other hand, daily multivitamin use improved cognitive function. That is, participants assigned to the multivitamin group had higher cognitive test scores after 3 years than the participants assigned to the multivitamin-placebo group. The investigators estimated that taking the daily multivitamin slowed cognitive aging by approximately 60%, or the equivalent of 1.8 years over the 3 years of the study, but this finding requires confirmation in future research. “COSMOS-Mind provides the first evidence from a large randomized trial to show that regular use of a typical daily multivitamin may improve memory and thinking abilities in older adults,” noted COSMOS Co-Director Dr. Howard Sesso, who leads COSMOS with Dr. JoAnn Manson. However, the story continues to unfold as other investigators complete separate studies in COSMOS that dig more deeply into the effects of both cocoa extract and a multivitamin on different aspects of cognition and other aging-related outcomes.
My grandmother was the only person I knew growing up who didn’t love the English or their Queen. She usually made this clear by slightly snide remarks, an oddity because she was generally very nice to people.
I didn’t understand this until many years later, when my father told me that while my grandmother was a teenager in the second decade of the 20th century, her grandfather lived with her family at the hotel they ran in Christoval, Texas. He was going blind by then, so she used to read to him from books he was fond of as well as from the newspapers.
So I imagine that in the spring of 1916, she read to him about the Easter Uprising in Ireland against the British.
I should mention that her grandfather, Florence McCarthy, was born in County Cork, Ireland, and immigrated to the United States as a young man in the 1850s. I don’t know why he came, except that he had a brother in New York, but while it might have been for economic reasons, it might also have been political ones.
In any case, based on my grandmother’s attitude about the English, I venture to say his politics were on the Irish side of the Uprising.
My grandmother, in fact, always saw herself as Irish even though she never visited the place. I don’t think she left the U.S. except for a trip or two to Mexico. But she was always more Irish in her own mind than she was Texan. Continue reading “Family History and the Queen”…
I was ten when A Hard Day’s Night came out. It played for about a year at the Village Cinema, four blocks from my house in Greenwich Village. The Village Cinema was a little art house, and while my mother was not against dropping the kids at the movies (I was 10, my brother was 8) especially during the summer when it was hot and there was air conditioning, she preferred to do it at the Waverly or the Loews Sheraton (both larger, with a larger, more supervisory staff to make sure we wouldn’t be spirited away). I think she found the Village Cinema–what was called an “art house” in those days, a little skeevy. In any case, neither my mother nor my father was enthused by the idea of taking us themselves and spending two hours watching what they anticipated would be a standard teen-pop-star movie.
Enter my Aunt Julie. Julie is my mother’s younger sister. She not only didn’t balk at taking us to the movie, she was delighted. By the time she came to visit we were in Massachusetts for the summer, so the three of us went to the Mahaiwe, the local theatre in Great Barrington, to see it. The rest, as far as we were concerned, was history. The three of us came home afterwards singing and quoting lines (“I now declare this bridge open…”) and within a week or two my mother, at least, gave in to the siren call of upbeat music and my aunt’s enthusiastic recommendation, and she began quoting from it as well. My grandmother called to ask me what the refrain of “he’s very clean,” referring to Paul’s grandfather, was all about. I saw Hard Day’s Night a good dozen times over the next year, and whole chunks of the dialogue moved into our household vernacular. Continue reading “Very Clean”…
I’m in the middle of a kitchen fit-out. As I type this, the tiler is preparing the wall, and his favourite radio show fills my workspace.
I’ve been waiting for this for over thirty years. The cupboards are almost done, and well over half of them are filled with my cooking equipment. Over two metres of shelf space (about six feet for the non-metric among us) is cookbooks and food reference books. I already have nearly three metres of food-related books in a nearby shelf in my lounge room. Finally, I will be able to find the books I want, when I want. I suspect this means that whenever I need to write about comfort books, for the next little while, I’ll be writing about food or food history.
What sort of books do I have? Everything from Apicius in Latin (with a facing French translation), through a history of potatoes, from Ancient Greek recipes to seventeenth century Polish, from food archaeology in the thirteenth century to food travels in the twentieth. French cooking magazines, a great many community cookbooks and Jewish cookbooks, and… well, lots. I’ve not counted them in recent years – five metres of shelf space is many, many books.
Also, someone stole some once, and I’m still aggrieved. A friend of mine has been gradually replenishing the community cookbook section from the stolen, which is a wonderful process of discovery. I used to have more community cookbooks from Victoria, which is my own background, but now they represent the far west. Next time she visits, I shall cook her dinner from some of the coolest recipes in the books she’s sent me.
Eventually, I’ll bring categories together. My old herbals and wild harvest books are scattered: Culpeper and Mrs Grieve need company. I have two modern cookbooks that recreate Medieval cuisine that I use all the time, then an array of similar books (with research problems, or no recipes) I use mainly for research. Do I store them together? Do I keep all books on food in the Middle Ages together, from the brilliantly insightful ones that I love, to the ones I love to hate because they claim everything and deliver errors?
I’ll not make firm decisions now. The tiler is doing the tiles today and I can’t cook until he’s finished. Dinner tonight is cold chicken sandwiches, made from ingredients that are living right next to my television. It’s camping, in a way.
Next week I’ll have access to everything, I hope, and after that… wait and see.
Right now, I have deadlines.
This post was written several years ago and published elsewhere.
A book is like a child: grubby, ill-behaved, beautiful, beloved. Often all those things at the same time. You finish a book and send it off into the world with the fervent hope that strangers will be kind. Editors will not only recognize your baby’s beauty and charm, but will see past that unfortunate haircut and the scabs on her knees, and will want to teach it manners and perhaps pay for the braces and ballet lessons that will allow your child to be as loved by The World as she is by her parents.
Sick of this metaphor yet? The thing is, even the best parent artist has blind spots. For that reason, you rely on editors. And art directors. And book designers and proof-readers and on and on. But even those folks can get, um, blinded by their own involvement. The result can be a bad edit, a horrible cover, a well-intentioned marketing effort that appears to be aimed at an audience from Mars. Continue reading “Ugly Baby”…