The Real Reason Bank Pens Are Chained

The narrative tool, restrained.

You’ve used one: a ballpoint on a short chain, secured to the counter or attached to a clipboard. It’s easy to read it as distrust. Most of us would assume the pen is chained because otherwise it would eventually be stolen or absentmindedly pocketed. That is true on the surface, but there is a crucial reason that's easy to miss. The bank can’t function without the pen. Even in the digital era, ink on paper is often required.

The pen exists so that people can fill in the form, provide consent, and become a line in a ledger. And yet it writes like any other pen: a name, a signature, an angry note in the margin, information the form didn’t ask for. The chain limits how far the pen can travel. It limits nothing about what the pen can say.

That’s the position I find myself in as a writer. To tell a story at all, I’m told to use the tools that make stories legible: beats, arcs, the hero’s journey, the expectations of genre. These are the forms. If I chose to fill them out correctly, maybe the system would place my work. Editors, publishers, and reviewers often decide in advance what a book is allowed to be, limiting the reach of what doesn’t conform. But the chained pen can still record something the system didn’t approve.

So I created my own system and chained the pen to it. A place where things get quietly questioned, sorted, and printed. That place is the Chained Pen Clearinghouse.

Classification Pending is my first book. Little more than a collection of notes in the margins. From a tax sale auction at an old hotel, to a Buddhist hermitage in Mexico, to the halls of MuchMusic in Toronto. Three institutions where things and people are constantly being catalogued, numbered, interpreted, or placed, and most of it doesn’t quite fit the entry. I didn't write about systems from the outside. I was complicit. From the end of the chain, I tried to record what would otherwise be left out.

I don’t argue that classification is the enemy. But I find myself returning to what gets flattened when a thing becomes an entry in the ledger, and whether a guy like me can show any of what gets left out.

Classification Pending by D. Gardiner, published by Chained Pen Clearinghouse, is available now on Amazon.