Doorways to creative writing

I have always been obsessed with doors and doorways. Of course, I wrote an entire book about doorways—Kendra Kandlestar and the Door to Unger. While working on that book, I built a large prop of the Door to Unger. I don’t cart it around much, as it turned out to be large, unwieldy, and heavy, but otherwise I was pretty happy with the result.

Well, after reading the first week’s worth of stories from my current writing class, it seemed to me that most of my students had stories that either featured doorways, or certainly had the potential to. So I decided we would build our own door props. Of course, we couldn’t try to make them as big as mine, but I was determined to use wood instead of paper and cardboard.

Without too much difficulty, I was able to find some inexpensive balsam slats and some pre-cut wooden shapes for ornamentation. Not all the doorways are finished yet, but some snapshots of our work in progress are shown below. We have all manner of doorways; some are portals to magical worlds, while others hide treasure or danger. There’s a magic elevator, a doorway to Candy Land, and a doorway that is swarming with (ugh) spiders.