Roberta Writes – Thursday Doors: Doors to my author’s mind Part 1

Welcome to Thursday Doors, a weekly feature allowing door lovers to come together to admire and share their favorite door photos from around the world. Feel free to join in on the fun by creating your own Thursday Doors post each week and then sharing your link in the comments below, anytime between 12:01 am Thursday morning and Saturday noon (North American eastern time).

You can find Dan’s latest post here: https://nofacilities.com/2022/07/14/return-to-old-wethersfield/

Last week for Dan Antion’s Thursday Doors Challenge, Teagan Riordain Geneviene wrote a post about her author’s mind. Your can read Teagan’s post here: https://teagansbooks.com/2022/07/07/thursdaydoors-to-my-authors-mind-noisy-characters/

Teagan’s post got me thinking about doors and their meaning in my own writing life. They do seem to play a significant role because I see doors as entry points into new and exciting things in life.

Opportunity (tanka poem) 

Make your own success 

Leave no pathway untrodden 

Opportunity 

Will knock only once in life 

Be sure to answer the door 

from Behind Closed Doors by Robbie Cheadle

I also believe I have a tidy mind. Each ‘collection’ of thoughts and ideas in my life has its own ‘room’ in my mind and they don’t pass through the doors and get muddled. People often ask me how I manage so many projects at once and all the different aspects of my busy life, and this is how. Everything has a separate storage space in my head.

When I was writing my poetry book, Behind Closed Doors, I saw a cover, designed by Teagan, which exactly captured my ideas about how my mind would look if it could be caught in a picture.

This was the cover:

Each of those doors represents a different storage area in my mind: Family, relationships, work and corporate life, prose writing, reading, artwork, conservation, and poetry. Within those layers there are sub-layers and each has its own entry point into my life.

My writing incorporates a lot of doors, either through though processes or though actual depictions of doors and physical choices. Every door is different and every outcome is coloured by that difference in choice. Even artworks are different and have different purposes and meanings.

This cake below was a Covid-19 memory cake and depicted life during lockdown.

These are a few of the poems (limericks) I wrote to go with this cake:

Inevitable side-effects of Zoom and working from home (limericks) 

He sat on his cellular phone in the room 

Having just finished a meeting on Zoom 

What a frightening sight 

His expression, dark as night 

The seed of a monster starting to bloom 

***

Endless back-to-back meetings on Zoom 

Fill employees with a sense of gloom 

The leader strikes like a snake 

When colleagues make a mistake 

When will it end and normality resume? 

from Behind Closed Doors by Robbie Cheadle

The above artwork and thoughts are completely separate from my children’s artwork. This cake is called Dinah in Wonderland. Dinah is the little back cat who is sleeping at the front of the dark chocolate cake. She is dreaming about a wonderland for cats. A place where nothing would be as it is and everything would be as it isn’t.

This cake and the limerick story I wrote to go with it was inspired by this song from Alice in Wonderland:

I’ll end this post with an extract form Alice in Wonderland, a book I adored as a child and of which I have eight different copies as an adult. Of course, this quote is about a door:

“Alice finding tiny door behind curtain

Alice opened the door and found that it led into a small passage, not much larger than a rat-hole: she knelt down and looked along the passage into the loveliest garden you ever saw. How she longed to get out of that dark hall, and wander about among those beds of bright flowers and those cool fountains, but she could not even get her head though the doorway; `and even if my head would go through,’ thought poor Alice, `it would be of very little use without my shoulders. Oh, how I wish I could shut up like a telescope! I think I could, if I only know how to begin.’ For, you see, so many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.

There seemed to be no use in waiting by the little door, so she went back to the table, half hoping she might find another key on it, or at any rate a book of rules for shutting people up like telescopes: this time she found a little bottle on it, (`which certainly was not here before,’ said Alice,) and round the neck of the bottle was a paper label, with the words `DRINK ME’ beautifully printed on it in large letters.”

You can read more of Alice in Wonderland and see more pictures here: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rgs/alice-I.html