The most sophisticated people I know -- inside they are all children.

Jim Henson

ProjectPen was originally called the ‘Chronicles of Pen’. The Pen character symbolized what Christopher Vogler and others have called ‘The Writers Journey’.

I figured that of all the struggling writers out there, it was probably the Pen that people appreciated and remembered the least. Mike V. Derderian liked the concept, and chose to illustrate it.

We discussed the possibility of creating a space for writers to begin the journey of writing in the Middle East.

Mike had founded and worked on a project called ‘Palestine the Graphic Novel’. Getting that work published was proving difficult.

A question formed: how many more great writers and storytellers were there in Amman, and around the region, that weren’t being given the encouragement they needed?

What if we could create new kinds of stories, and reflect the work of a new generation of writers – in English and Arabic? What if we could use Social Media networks, and partner with friends, to promote their work…. bypassing the print run, and the control than came with it?

And what if we could get people not just writing, but reading and interacting with stories? What if those stories were derived from the local… as stories used to be?

ProjectPen was born from these questions.

Creating authentic content from and by the Middle East, seemed exciting.

This was when Maisa, Ola and Bana got on board.

Maisa Khudair is Chief Arabic Editor at Al Bawaba News and has some of the best written Arabic in Jordan (I have that on good authority).

Ola Eliwat manages a beautiful blog called Cinnamon Zone; she has the touch of a natural storyteller. I used to read a series of her stories every morning, after coffee at work.

As for Bana she’s the lively character that once upon a time graced the airwaves of Spin Jordan -- no one quite communicates like she does. She has a great sense of what people like and don’t like.

It was Bana who explained the need for ‘alias’ or ‘Pen Names’, especially for female writers, which is something I had never thought of.

On the face of it, what we were doing was crazy. We devoted our time to a hunch.

We wanted English and Arabic stories not just on the same site, but on the same homepage – even if that put people off. There was and remains no guarantee that the kind of stories we were hoping for existed.

We wanted artists and creators who locked their blogs in corners of the internet to volunteer content, with no guarantee it would get posted. All we could offer in return was a shout out.

And we wanted to do it all for free, curated, edited and supported by anyone who could spare the time, or believed in the project, with everything licensed under a Creative Commons License.

So a developer at ProDigi called Mohammad Tarakiyee gave up several weekends to build ProjectPen by adapting Tumblr – it’s one of the only Arabic Tumblr blogs out there.

Stories can be selected by author, theme, and language [AR/EN].

The layout is mobile friendly. The homepage can be easily manipulated to suit any kind of content -- including audio, video and illustration.

In Tarakiyee we had found both Ninja, and scribe. He built ProjectPen while sipping coffee, surfing facebook, debating HTML5 and politics, and generally doing twenty things at once.

We introduced an early stage of the concept at 7iber Labs, at the Ras Al Ain Gallery in February. The response GOOD.

But back then the site still looked like this:

 

Until Maysa Sultan, the Graphic Designer behind the look of GO Magazine, stepped in and applied a magic wand.

To finish up, we all spent a lot of time thinking about the image, philosophy and ethos of what we wanted to achieve.

None of us wanted to start a site for our friends; a ‘cool project’ that would evaporate quickly. We wanted stories based on worth.

We wanted to create a site with beautiful content, fling it out into the digital atmosphere, and ask for nothing back in return.

That idea has left a lot of people scratching their heads – but artists and writers have seemed to understood the message instinctively.

After years of hearing about how creative Cairo and Beirut are we wanted to show that Amman has an awful lot of surprises – people with imaginations that deserved to be celebrated.

The real trick behind ProjectPen won’t be conjuring writers out of nowhere, working in two languages, or maintaining an agile site completely free.

The real challenge will be forming an ecosystem in which writers support each other, and creative professionals have the maturity and confidence to partner with each other towards a common goal: the raising of standards, the promotion of talent, the love of art, and a space in which collaboration becomes more than a slogan.

We’re making mistakes. We’re learning  a lot of new things.

P.s. Bana took the pic. Maysa was nowhere to be found (FB invite said Germany, which may explain it). Big up to Aysha, Aseel, Laith, Ahmad, Dina & of course Mimi.