The Movies

You may be thinking: "How the heck are movies and pens related?"

 Everyone has a favorite movie, right?  The one that makes you sweat.  The one that makes you hide your eyes, the one that makes you cry tears of joy, of sorrow. The one that makes you furious or simply takes your breath away.

 Favorite movies make you feel emotions, they make you feel as if you're participating instead of just watching a bunch of disconnected and uninteresting scenes.  The stronger the emotions you feel, the more prominent a place the movie may occupy in your memory, in your own life story.

 As a kid, I had a favorite.  Star Wars, unsurprisingly.  Yeah, I was one of those kids.  With my friends, we saw the movie in the theaters at least 15 times, followed by many more viewings, growing more and more nostalgic as time passed.  I bought the soundtrack, I bought the book adaptation by George Lucas, even started a small trading card collection before I realized I didn't enjoy that aspect of movie fandom.

 But that movie made an impression on me back then, and a glimpse of the poster can whisk me back into that time of my life in an instant.

 "But PK, how are pens related?"

 Frankly I could answer that in two ways.  The first is the connection to creativity and storytelling.  The first and most human way to tell a story in a non-ephemeral way is through the pen.  The storyteller uses the pen to act as a tool to translate the writer's otherwise unknowable vision into a form of art that can then communicate that vision back into another person's brain.  All the while, the writer knows that the written words will convey the intended meaning, whether they are present or have passed into history centuries ago.

 When you read the words on a page, you are reading the thoughts of the writer as they were expressed onto the page.  You are travelling into the past to listen to the writer tell the story, untouched by time.

 The second answer is directly related the pen itself and how it's created.  Making a pen by hand is every bit an act of creativity using a different medium to tell a story about the story.  When you hold a pen, especially one used by another author, you are using your eyes and your skin to feel what they felt when writing that story.   The weight of the pen.  The pressure of the pen as the thoughts flow through to the page.  The feel of the pen's construction.  The warmth of the wood or metal or plastic or bone.

 That experience of tactile and visual memory can be contained in the materials used to construct the pen, closing the circle of memories and storytelling.

 Let's revisit the idea of having a favorite movie.  My wife's favorite movie has got to be Shawshank Redemption, based on a book written by horror-meister Stephen King - ironically not a horror story at all.  In the movie, the main character is sent to prison after being convicted of murder.  During his time in prison he befriends another prisoner, has various encounters with other members of the prison population, the guards, the warden, etc.  Eventually, he escapes by crawling through a tiny sewer pipe in a sequence that has become nearly iconic in modern moviemaking.

 Years before his escape, he told his close friend of a place in New England.  A field with an old rock wall, and in a corner of the fence overshadowed by a massive, stately and very old oak tree he would find buried a small box containing some useful items for his friend to use after he was released from prison.

 That oak tree also became iconic and instantly recognizable to probably two generations of movie fans over the past several decades.  Sadly, it succumbed to age and disease and was finally downed by several very strong storms and had to be fully removed from where it had lived for at least 150 years in Missouri.

 This pen is made from a piece of that tree, the Shawshank Oak, harvested and sold by a woodworker in the area, and it was part of a set of four pens I made for my wife as gifts for her son, for herself and for a dear friend of hers.  So, she can touch that pen, write with it, create with it, and experience through that pen a piece of the movie and bring her back to the time when she first fell in love with the story.

 Plus, looks pretty nice if you ask me.