Meet Your Maker: Jason Olson, Write Turnz

(Caroline Foty's first fountain pen was a 1970s Sheaffer No Nonsense that still writes perfectly. Since she discovered pens by independent makers, she wants "one of each, please" and wants to meet all the makers. Maybe you do, too. She lives in Baltimore with pens, cats, and all kinds of fiber arts supplies.)

A stroke of adversity provided the incentive Jason Olson needed to take his hobby to the next level. “I was a product manager, and they showed me the door.”

Being laid off changed the role of pen making in his life. “I needed to take my fun and profitable hobby and move it forward quickly.”

Olson received a good education in the industrial arts in high school – woodworking, welding, industrial design, and even some landscape design. He built furniture, like tables and desks, including the rolltop desk his daughter currently uses to do homework. Pens were not initially part of this repertoire of making, although they were definitely something he paid attention to. “I always wanted to have cool pens to take on business trips. Retro 51s were the gateway pen.”

Then, a friend got a free wood lathe from a work colleague, that came with some pen kits. “I kept going over to use his lathe until he said, ‘So, are you going to order a lathe, or what?’ And one turned into two, turned into a metal lathe, and a drill press… We can’t park anything in the garage.”

Olson emphasizes the use of unusual materials in his pens. “Fossils, fordite, anything that’s different. I search weird websites looking for materials, you have to buy it when you see it or it’s gone.” Among his scores have been bits of material from a space shuttle, the Hundred Acre Wood, Folsom prison, Apollo 11, and the Copa Room floor from Howard Hughes’ Sands Casino in Las Vegas. “I did a group of gambling themed pens, with a stand and a $100 clay poker chip from the Sands.” Because he so often uses unusual woods, his garage also contains a vacuum chamber to stabilize his wood pieces.

With a stash of such materials, inspiration is basically found by looking through his storage drawers. Sometimes people who are commissioning pens provide materials as well. “People bring us materials that are important to them. I like telling stories in commissions.”

Olson does cast his own materials. “When I need something specific to match a fossil or other piece, I will. Learning to cast is one of the things that got me to meet some of the other makers. But casting has exploded with people who are much better at it than I am.”

Olson’s main trademark is the metal work on his pens. “I don’t make pens without clips. I did a few pens without clips at the beginning…but everyone else did, too.” He was mentored by Tim Cullen (of Hooligan Georgia) and David Broadwell, both masters of metal. “It took awhile for me to find my niche as a guy who does metal work and uses interesting materials. That’s my lane, I try to stay in my lane.” He is planning to attend a one week engraving school in Missouri, to add to his repertoire of metal skills. “I was scheduled for the school, but there was a hurricane that week…”

One master of metal knows another. Olson’s favorite pen he didn’t make himself was made by the late Greg Hardy. “He made me a pen representing a hot rod I rebuilt. I cast the material to match the car. He etched the grille of the car on the clip, and racing stripes in the cap. It’s amazing.”

Each new project presents Olson with new opportunities for creativity. “I enjoy envisioning and developing a design and building it into a piece I can hold in my hand. There are challenges each material and design give me. The weirder it gets, the more challenging it becomes.” And this ensures there is always growth. “Different metals, different techniques, I’m always trying something. There will be an ‘aha’ moment – why haven’t I always done this?? If you’re not going forward, you’re going backward.”

Jason Olson’s work can be seen on his Instagram @writeturnz, his website writeturnz.com, and at pen shows in California, Baltimore, Miami, Orlando, Dallas, DC, and maybe San Francisco and New York.

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Meet Your Maker: Rhys Wilson, Rhys’s Pieces

(Caroline Foty's first fountain pen was a 1970s Sheaffer No Nonsense that still writes perfectly. Since she discovered pens by independent makers, she wants "one of each, please" and wants to meet all the makers. Maybe you do, too. She lives in Baltimore with pens, cats, and all kinds of fiber arts supplies.)

It’s all pens all the time for Rhys Wilson. Not only does he make pens, he works at Penchetta Pen and Knife store in Scottsdale, Arizona, the only remaining pen and stationery shop in the Phoenix area out of what used to be a handful.

Fifteen years bartending and waiting tables burned him out. “Much as that can be fun and can be lucrative, it also really kind of mentally drained me – I’m a very introverted person overall, and it really takes a lot out of me to do all that interacting.” The pen part of the store has grown exponentially thanks to the explosion of online material about pens. “It’s really fun being able to have pens be the entirety of what I do.”

Pens kind of sneaked up on him. While he loved school supply season as a kid (like most of us did), he tended to prefer fancy mechanical pencils, and had to use disposable pens at work. “I could never carry anything super nice, because periodically I had to give it to a customer and a lot of the time they would disappear.” He and his fiancée were doing crafting in their spare time, and one of the things he made was epoxy resin camping knife handles. “There would always be some extra resin left, I wanted something to do with that extra resin – it’s kind of wasteful to throw it in the trash. I stumbled across a video from another resin artist who used his dregs to make little inlay rings. When I started doing those, all I had was a little drill press and it was kind of a pain in the butt to shape and polish them on a drill press!” His fiancée’s mom bought him a mini lathe, which happened to come with a pen mandrel. “I thought, well I have this, I might as well try it, so I made a couple pen kits and fell in love.”

Wilson’s creative instincts quickly led him to feel somewhat restricted by pen kits. He began researching ways to customize kits, and “fell down the kitless pen rabbit hole.” YouTube content from Turner’s Warehouse and RJB Wood Turner facilitated his explorations. Like many makers, it wasn’t long before he began seeking ways to make more involved pens. “My favorite thing is trying new things and seeing what works and what doesn’t.”

Just because he was fairly new at the process didn’t mean he kept it plain. “My very very first kitless pen ever that I made was actually a hybrid with acrylic in the wood. So I’ve always done the slightly more complicated stuff, and I’m getting better and better at it with more experience and better tools. It’s also fun to get some of these really really cool hand poured resins and with a simple design let material speak for itself. Some of the most beautiful pens are just simple.”

Despite starting out with a resin craft, Wilson is not drawn to make his own blanks. “I have made some myself, but it’s an art form in and of itself and one that didn’t quite grab me the way the pens did. There are already so many people doing really cool blanks that I don’t necessarily feel a need to throw my hat in the game, I’m showcasing their awesome work with what I do.” His favorite materials to work with are acrylics – “They are easier to finish than some of the urethane resins, they are denser and have some of that luxe feel” – and also ebonite, which he loves for its natural, warm feel in the hand.

This perhaps explains why his favorite pen he didn’t make for himself is an ebonite Sailor King of Pen. He also loves a black ebonite pen he made that’s finished with urushi lacquer. “I was contacted by a person in Australia who asked me to make an ebonite pen that would take urushi lacquer. He said that if I made two pens and sent them to him, he would pay for one of them, then urushi the other one and send it back to me. I said YES PLEASE. This is one of my most prized possessions.” Is there a color theme here?? Not really; his first pen was a silver LAMY AL-Star.

Moving forward, Wilson wants to explore more metal work, both for aesthetic results and for feel. “I know as a maker that quality things can be lightweight, but there’s just something I find that we as humans have in our brains, that equates heft and weightiness to quality especially on slightly more expensive stuff. I think having a good heft to something really helps sell it as a good value to somebody when they first hold it.” That means saving up for a metal lathe to add to his toolkit, and exploring more metals for things like accent bands. “I’d love to be able to do titanium accent bands, there’s so much you can bring to that with color, or anodization, but it’s a very very hard material to work with. Trying to do that by hand on the wood lathe would be I think rather dangerous.”

Wilson does take pen commissions, although he has what he describes as a love/hate relationship with them. “I do really enjoy taking somebody’s idea and bringing it to life, but that can really be hard sometimes, and some folks are more particular than others about having that, call it perfection. It’s possible to get everything perfect when you’re doing things by hand, given enough time. Taking the time to get things perfect is hard. Finding where I’m willing to let small things slide has been interesting, because I can get really perfectionist with things. These are handmade objects, and there is a level of wabi-sabi that most people are willing to embrace in a handmade object.”

Wilson says he has a little bit of impostor syndrome as a fairly new maker in a community of seasoned artists. “That has actually been a huge part of working at Penchetta that has been helpful for me, being able to compare my stuff with these $2000 Visconti Homo Sapiens special editions and whatnot, seeing the level of fit and finish on pens that cost considerably more than even my most expensive pen to date.“

The most satisfying part of making pens for Wilson is “being able to take something out of my head, put it into the real world, and not just do that but have it be something that somebody could, ideally, pass down to a kid, or to a grandchild, or something like that.” That’s one of the reasons that while he enjoys making the resin pens, he loves making the more heirloom quality “functional art” pieces. “What I really like is finding those pairings of wood and resins that you may not expect, that really arrest you when you see them.”

Rhys Wilson’s work can be seen on his Instagram @rhyss_piecess_, his website Rhys’ Pieces, and maybe at the San Francisco Pen Show.

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Meet Your Maker: Gavin Hardy, Hardy Penwrights

In late 2024 the fountain pen community was shaken by the news of the sudden passing of Greg Hardy, the well-loved character behind Hardy Penwrights. But Hardy Penwrights lives on, in the hands of Greg Hardy’s son Gavin.

Gavin started working for his father after moving back from Wisconsin to northern New York, to be nearer family. “My parents were selling my childhood home so we bought it and renovated it.” Because Greg wanted to expand the business, Gavin, otherwise a fulltime musician, began working for Hardy Penwrights.

“When I was a kid, he had given me a fountain pen, you know, the plastic Sheaffer with the flat top…” (probably a Sheaffer No Nonsense) “…so I was interested in them. Senior year I needed an extra elective so I put together a calligraphy class with my dad.”

Pens took a back seat to music until Gavin returned to New York. “I never made a kit pen. My dad gave me detailed instructions on how to turn a pen, and I learned.” The shop was at Greg’s house, about a twenty minute drive in the morning. “We’d drink coffee for an hour and a half and then start our work.” Ultimately most of the shop was relocated to Gavin’s house. “He wanted to do less of the business and more metal work, which he was more interested in.”

“He gave me a crash course in soldering techniques - we did a few runs of pens where I did the clips. I wanted to make sure we were still able to offer the metal work. It was certainly educational!” Education also came from Tim Crowe of Turnt Pen Company, who lived not far away and is a blank casting specialist. “Tim gave me the setup to get started – a pressure pot, a compressor, a mold, some mica. There is more instant gratification in material casting than on the pen side.”

How does one step out from the shadow of one’s well-known parent after inheriting a thriving business? Gavin says Greg’s primary focus was “creating art. I think that’s noble and beautiful and I want to do that too, but I’m not retired!” He’s working on making some changes to the company’s lineup, to make products that are viable for shows. “I wanted a less expensive model that’s just as nice as our other models.”

The first result of this process is the Proletariat model. The pen has a satin finish instead of a glossy polish, and a laser engraved logo instead of cast silver. The sections are made from cutoffs from other projects. “I’m focusing on the Proletariat as our main production model, and simplifying what we do across the lineup. The goal is the same as it was, to produce a quality fountain pen that makes people want to use it.” Gavin is still making clips – “Maybe we’ll have one signature clip instead of a different one for every model, and vary that for a custom or limited run. I’m making it easier for one guy in a shop to keep up.”

There have already been a couple of custom pieces that have tested his mastery of the metalwork that was his father’s passion. A pen for a close family friend and neighbor has a rollstop with special significance. “She wanted something that was representative of our family, so the roll-stop had two big circles representing me and my wife in silver and bronze, and two little circles representing our kids in mokume gane which has silver and bronze swirled together.” A custom pen with a complex cap overlay of birds and leaves represents a continuation of the Hardy metal tradition.

Despite the ability to make such complex pieces, Gavin’s favorite pens that didn’t come out of the Hardy workshop are in a different style. “I have a really cool PapaJ pen. I gave him some ideas when he wanted to make rollstops, and he sent me one with his floral rollstop.” He does have one of his own making – “it’s black, it’s boring” – and then he likes “Zebra clicky pens! I like the slim fine ones.”

Things are still settling out with the business, website, and show schedules. It’s taking some time to get the business fully transferred to his name, and updating the website is a pending task. He only envisions attending two shows in 2026, and maybe adding one or two more next year. “My goal is three to six shows a year. I just can’t keep up the schedule my dad had.”

Even doing it all on his own now, he still enjoys the work. “There are things I don’t enjoy, but that’s any job. When I’m doing a run of thirty pens, that gets a little hairy, but I enjoy audiobooks and podcasts.” Unlike many makers, this musician doesn’t listen to music in the shop. “I find myself thinking about the music too much.” DND live-play podcasts are more his speed.

Gavin has no trouble articulating what he likes best about making pens. “There’s a sense of accomplishment and pride in seeing other people’s reactions to something you made. There’s the community it hooks you up with – people who are interesting, kind, and supportive. And there’s the flexibility of working for myself – I have a four year old, a two year old, and a wife with a demanding job.”

The legacy of Hardy Penwrights also provides a deep sense of meaning. “I’m continuing what I was doing with my dad, keeping that part of our relationship alive. And it’s possibly something I can also share with my kids.”

Gavin Hardy’s work can be seen on his Instagram @hardypenwrights, the website at Hardy Penwrights, and at shows in Chicago and DC.

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Membership starts at just $5/month, with a discounted annual option available. To find out more about membership click here and join us!