This Art Gym was inspired by Anne Helen Petersen’s Substack naming portals as the big changes that we are periodically pushed into or pulled through in our lives. Petersen is particularly interested in women’s portal experience around mid-life — what if we reframed the “mid-life crisis,” which is often tied to masculinity anyway, as an honest, empowering, creative transition rather than a grown-up tantrum? What meaning can we make of these big, somehow unexpected, life transitions? This Art Gym explored portal concepts through narrative and illustration.
Begin
For this activity, you may work with your own experience or you may imagine the experiences of a fictional character. If you have another creative project going, it may be helpful to focus this activity on a character that feels mysterious to you. Portals reveal character (we learned!).
Generate – Sensory
Imagine a mundane moment in your/character’s daily life. This might be a routine, a thing that you/they do daily almost without thinking. You may draw or write — including simple note-taking — to capture this moment. This first stage is a sensory sketch. Document this scene using all five senses. What sounds do you/they hear? What can you/they smell? Taste, touch, see? You might write this out as a list, or visualize it as an illustration. You might write prose, or you might create hybrid text.
You might set a timer for this stage (3-5 minutes) to encourage freewriting.
Generate – Interior
Next, staying in this mundane moment, answer two questions:
- What are you / your character feeling?
- What do you / your character want?
You might set a shorter timer for this stage (2-3 minutes) to encourage freewriting.
Discuss
Read aloud this excerpt from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in which the siblings experience the wardrobe/portal. Notice how the characters behave/interact in the transitional portal space. What changes happen? What is possible in the portal? If you’d like, you may also consider an excerpt from Alice in Wonderland in which Alice falls down the rabbit hole.
What happens in “the portal” in these stories? What does putting the characters there do for the story, what does it make happen?
Depending on your group, this may be a a 20-40 minute discussion.
Reflect
Return to your writing or drawing from earlier. First, circle 3-5 things or words that you / your character might carry into the portal. They may be objects or figurative things to be carried. You may not have much reason for choosing them except that they stand out to you. Rewrite/draw these things at the top of a new page.
Generate – A New Sensory Experience
Based on your discussion of what a portal can do, put yourself/your character in a portal and imagine: what happens there? Apply the principles of the portal to yourself / your character.
Having experienced a portal in the way the characters in those children’s books did, imagine you / your character on the other side of a portal, in a new world. Much is different here, but you/they still have routines — the mundane (i.e. worldly!) remains, even in this new world. Reimagine your mundane scene from earlier, having carried over many of the sensory and even interior details from the first draft. It’s the same time of day, the same sort of routine for the same purpose, but in a completely new context.
Briefly (2-3 minutes), document what is happening, what this new context is like.
Generate – A New Interior
On the other side of the portal …
- What are you/your character feeling?
- What do you / your character want?
Reflect
You might compare your new interior to the pre-portal interior. What changed? Does one feel more real? What have you learned about yourself / your character from this activity?