My Pen by Christopher Myers is a children’s picture book that encourages readers to use their imaginations. The story celebrates the colloquial “power of the pen.” The drawings of people are realistic and amazing. This is a great book for parents of young artists and teachers, who want to read a book as inspiration to start a class exercise in imagination and creativity.
The author writes about many of the amazing and impossible things he can do with his pen. The story is told in the first person narrative. The artist and author created a little boy, representative of himself, for readers to follow through the imaginative scenarios that the author creates with his pen. The pen represents the author’s artistic talent with the power to create worlds. The pen is spoken of throughout the book in terms of what it can do. It is included in five drawings inside the book. You might not notice it the first time you read this book, but the pen appears twice as optical illusions. Look closer at the pictures of the x-ray and the forest.
On the surface, this book encourages readers to use their imaginations to make possible those things that are impossible. For example, there is a drawing of a boy, tap dancing upside down on the clouds. There is another drawing of satellite sneakers. There is a drawing of the boy riding a T-Rex. These things are technologically and scientifically impossible or improbable, but the author’s imagination and artistic talent made possible those things that are currently impossible to do or to have. The illustrations in this book are a feast for the eyes as you observe every line it took to draw each illustrated page and wonder how he did all of them with ink and pen.
The underlying message of the book is that powerless people can become empowered through art. For example, the author shows us how he can make giants out of old men and then, make them very small. In other words, he, as an artist, has the power to make people appear great and powerful and then, he has the power to take it all away.
In My Pen by Christopher Myers, art is power. Before photography for example, the wealthy and powerful paid artists to make them look dignified and virtuous in the eyes of others through paintings and sculptures. On the other hand before television, artists had the power to make a powerful person look foolish in the eyes of others through political caricatures in newspapers. In reality, I don’t believe that powerful people can be overpowered with art, but it is important to teach children to imagine the impossible, so they won’t feel limited by society.
I read this book to a three-year old boy, but he was simply not as impressed with the drawings as I was. The drawings are in black-and-white. There were no bright colors to draw his attention. This book may be more appropriate to an older child in school. When I thought myself to be a budding artist at the age of five, the drawings in this book would have blown me away then as they do now. A child, who is truly serious about their own art, is going to be impressed by the realistic drawings of people in the book. This book is made for such children. That is why I recommend this book for parents of young artists. There will probably be a child in every classroom, who behaves as though arts and crafts are serious business. There are children, who are perfectionists with their artwork, and they don’t want anyone to see what they are making until it is truly finished. I recommend this book to teachers, day care providers, school librarians, and schools in general to make this book available to their students or to borrow it temporarily for their students from their local public library. I imagine a teacher could read this book to the class and then, send their students off to create imaginative worlds with an arts and crafts project.
Reference
Myers, Christopher. My Pen. Los Angeles: Disney-Hyperion, 2015.
Links:
Christopher Myers on Wikipedia
Christopher Myers on Reading Rockets
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