Overhead doors

A truck was pulled up in a driveway in my neighborhood. It said "Devine Overhead Doors." (Here's a photo from the company's website, if you'd like to know precisely what it looked like.) Now, it seems that "overhead door" means a garage door that rolls up, but my thoughts went like this:

Devine Divine Overhead Doors



It reminds me of one of the stories in The Ladies of Grace Adieu, where angels poke their heads out of windows in the sky.

In very slightly tangential news, I gave up on Every Heart a Doorway, not for any flaw on its part, but because I realized--belatedly--that I don't like sucking all portal experiences into one framework.

A little more on portal fantasy refugees

In the last entry, osprey_archer, sovay, and I got to talking (thread here) about the background premise of Every Heart a Doorway--namely, that there could be some kind of special school for young people who can't readjust to life in our world after having an adventure in another world. I realized I had some questions that go beyond that particular novella.

(1) Where does the notion that a portal adventure leaves you messed up come from? Is it all down to the fact of not being able to return to the magical world? What examples of this are there from portal fantasies themselves--excluding portal fantasies that are written as responses to other portal fantasies precisely to explore this point?

(2) In cases where the protagonists lose the ability to get back to the magical world, what elements make that most hard to deal with? To me, arbitrary limitations (like age-based ones) are more distressing than plot exigency ones (the latter being things like having to return to our world after your task in the other one is complete). Y/N? Random inexplicability is also troubling (thinking of people in folklore who have one taste of faery and then spend the rest of their lives trying to find a way to get another taste).

(3) Supposing a bunch of people who've traveled to other worlds did come together for mutual support, what kind of story would you imagine arising for them in that context?