Several friends have commented lately that they wish I’d write more, to tell more stories, even if it’s just short stories. I miss writing too, and when they mentioned it, I realized that I had been so lost in trying to catch up on work that I’d all but shut down from the stress. 

Thing is, we just went through two hurricanes and I spent the last half of September so sick I couldn’t stand up for more than a few minutes at a time. Trying to catch up on weeks’ worth of work after a natural disaster and illness is an adventure, let me tell you. I’ve been trying to play it down, not wanting to make people feel bad, but yowza. Even I’m feeling a bit defeated lately, and I know it’s showing.  

But I miss writing. I miss telling stories and sharing the random insights I stumble across while thinking too much. It gives me hope, and reminds me that I am doing more than just making pens and running a shop – I’m sharing the things I’ve found beautiful, inspiring, moving, funny, encouraging, thought-provoking. (Or trying to.) 

So… how about when I can’t find the energy to talk about The Now things I’m trying to get a handle on, I tell you the stories and inspirations behind pen materials and paintings? 

I’m starting with the story of a pen material that I’ve wanted to tell for a long time, but felt like it might be just a tad too sentimental. (I will own being a sap and romantic, heh.)  

In case you’re not familiar with all of the names I use and what they look like – there IS a lot of them – this is Catskills. Here’s a YouTube video showing the depth of the greens and the way the gold and copper and earth tones shift.

The Story Behind Catskills

When I was a kid, my family lived weekend-trip driving distance from the Catskills Mountains in Upstate New York. I know this because whenever my dad could manage it, we’d go camping on my grandparents’ land in the summer. (They lived in an RV there for about half the year.)

Seeing my grandparents was the highlight – these trips meant watching old musicals and playing board games with them, it meant Werther’s candy and stories and bonfires and silly songs and late nights that left us smelling like hardwood smoke in the morning.

But it also meant hammocks under pine and white birch trees, climbing boulders, wading into ponds to catch salamanders. Our vacation days were often spent wandering the sunlit forests of the Catskill Mountains, making moss-covered furniture and creating worlds of our own.

This material is was inspired by the way moss shimmers in that shifting light, under those trees. Inspired by the memory of the way the top points of that moss turned gold and copper and brown, as if some unknown hand had gilded the emerald and brilliant greens underneath. It’s inspired by the way even the green seemed to shimmer if you looked at it from different directions.

Catskills is at attempt to capture in pen-form the memory of glittering, shimmering summer childhood freedom, that thrilling sense of infinite potential waiting just under the trees, and the optimism of innocence, before the rest of the adult world had chance to creep in just yet. 

It’s a feeling I deeply need to reconnect to right now, after entirely too much of having to deal with some of the more challenging parts of adult life lately, and telling the story helps. I miss being able to spin up that sense of wonder when I cast new material or turn a pen, to be able to feel that excitement and enthusiasm in creating.  

Maybe you do too. Maybe remembering and holding to the light our own versions of moss and musicals can help us find those threads of excitement again. 

– A. Markov