Artist Series: What It Means to Make Something

On Writing: An essay by Kelton Wright

I’ve been wanting to introduce you to

Kelton Wright

for almost a year now, and I think we finally got the timing right. I can’t get enough of her Substack,

Shangrilogs

—a newsletter about relocation, recreation, and renovation at 10,000 feet written by, as she puts it, the nature-obsessed, Type-A daughter of a wildlife biologist and smokejumper. Tell me that doesn’t sound like something you want to read.

Kelton writes about everything from making friends in the middle of nowhere to how she moves through fear (this one hit me hard as it’s so wrapped up in who we are + who [and what] we lose when we become mothers) to moving to a town of 180 on an avalanche path. I left Los Angeles for a little mountain town of my own six years ago and never looked back and this is the kind of writing that settles right into the parts of me that are trying to make a home and a life out of something different, something special.

When she sent me the essay I’m going to share with you today I was sitting in the sun in wool socks even though it was 80 degrees outside. I read through the essay in a frenzy, devouring it, and I broke out in chills from the raw honesty of it all. It resonated so deeply with me as I, too, never wanted children and had dedicated all my energy and my love to art, to writing. And then something shifted. I wanted to make a life, but how do you make a life and nurture it and help it grow AND still make art in the way that both you and the art deserve?

Kelton gets us to the answer.

She also writes about self-esteem, what darkness can show us, joy, keeping (and not keeping) secrets, and tunneling her way through loss—creative or otherwise. “Must you find yourself on your knees, crushed, for it to count?”

God damn, this is a good one. Thank you, Kelton, for sharing a piece of yourself with us.

---

---

Kelton Wright is an author and brand leader living in the mountains of Colorado. She writes the whimsical newsletter Shangrilogs, a Substack Featured Publication two years in a row. You can find her work in publications such as The Guardian, Runner’s World, and Bicycling Magazine, and across brands like Headspace, Nike, and UnitedHealth Group.

---

What are you reading right now?

Wolfish by Erica Berry, which investigates the American relationship with wolves. I'll read any book related to American wildlife, as evidenced by my previous loves: Coyote America by Dan Flores and Beaverland by Leila Philip. I'm also knee-deep in the Sarah J. Maas universe of books. 

What do you do when you're coming up against resistance, and you can't seem to get to the center of the thing—the writing, the living, the task at hand? How do you get to where you want to go?

I go somewhere else. Typically up. I'm surrounded by Very Serious Mountains (actually the exact ones you see on Coors Light cans), and if I can't get down what I'm trying to say, I go up them. I have a compulsive need to workshop ideas out loud, and it's much easier to do that when you live in the middle of the woods. 

Tell me about this essay. Where did it come from?

I never wanted kids, so turning 34 a few years ago and suddenly wanting one felt like being abducted by aliens. Someone had planted a chip in me. I'd been brainwashed. I had been replaced by someone else. Whatever sci-fi theme works. Now that my husband and I are actually trying to make one, I cannot stop thinking about what else I am trying to make. Because I am "geriatric", getting pregnant takes thoughtful planning and scheduling, and I've just been furious with myself that I haven't dedicated that same seriousness to my art. This piece came from that frustration. (Thankfully a schedule also came from that frustration, but certainly, it took long enough.)

---

An essay
by Kelton Wright

What It Means to Make Something: Pregnancy vs Art

I’m in a book club that’s reading The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, an interactive how-to on reigniting your creativity. It functions like a 12-week program with tasks, homework, and thought exercises. In Chapter 8, Cameron talks about failure and creative loss. 

“If artistic creations are our brainchildren, artistic losses are our miscarriages. Women often suffer terribly, and privately, from losing a child who doesn’t come to term. And as artists we suffer terrible losses when the book doesn’t sell, the film doesn’t get picked up, the juried show doesn’t take our paintings, the best pot shatters, the poems are not accepted, the ankle injury sidelines us for an entire season.”

The group bristled at this, both to the idea that investing creatively meant potentially suffering pain as great as a miscarriage, and at the idea that any creative loss could even be as painful as a miscarriage. 

I had a miscarriage a couple months ago. It was an early one. When you search the internet for “is a chemical pregnancy a miscarriage?” one of the alternate questions it offers that people also search for is “does a chemical pregnancy count as a miscarriage?”

Does it count?

I found out I was pregnant and then I very soon after found out I wasn’t. I was annoyed. We had been trying for months. I huffed around the house yelling at various indignities, and then I signed into a Zoom meeting discussing various design elements for a new project. So did it count? Did it count when I brewed another cup of decaf and smiled sincerely at seeing my coworkers? Or does it only count if your heart is set? Must you find yourself on your knees, crushed, for it to count?

I’ve found myself in that position before, a year after I sold my first script to Hollywood and they’d workshopped it and me to death before firing me but keeping the idea. I spent months unraveling my self-esteem from the tightly wound ball of links it had become, buried at the bottom of my soul. I couldn’t talk about the project with anyone, feeling such shame and depression that the only relief was running until I couldn’t breathe. 

It wasn’t until the book club, two years and change later, that I talked about it at all. 

“I would rather have a chemical pregnancy every month this year than ever go through that again.” Even I paused after I said it. Was that true? Was that just years of disappointment finally being given a chance to breathe? I knew that I considered getting pregnant more a science than a magical gift. My mother is a biologist. My church was only ever the wildlife clinic she worked at where I watched life give way to death every day. Getting pregnant was merely these days at this temperature with this motility, and then you wait to see if the dough rises. Art though feels like magic, a great mystery that runs through you like a rogue electrical current that you either harness or lose forever. 

It felt like I’d lost something forever in the script. It felt like nothing had even started with the chemical pregnancy.

I still don’t call it a miscarriage.

---

Where we live, this far into the mountains and the woods, there is no ambient light. I was driving home on an empty moon not yet risen and I could barely see the ridgeline, more memory than monument. All that was lit was the low box built by my headlights, moving along the dirt road in front of me, illuminating the gravel and little else. If anything waited in the ditches, I didn’t see it. 

Sometimes, when the moon is high and fat and the gravel feels like the little chops of a sleepy sea, I turn my headlights off — the closest I get to being bad these days is just being in the dark.

I was thinking of the book club. If a creative loss was so much worse than a physical one, would that match the joys? In the depths of a moonless night, the road would only give away so much. Of course I knew when it would turn and bend, but the darkness always gives it the opportunity to do something else, to surprise me. I could drive straight into one of the other countless realities that could’ve been or maybe is somewhere else. 

But I pulled up to my house all the same, no new turns on the road revealed, not yet pregnant, novel not yet published. Same as I was — trying to make something beautiful. 

That should be one of those turns, pregnancy, the kind that changes the course. Instead, it feels like it’s on the course, up there on the syllabus with college and taxes and bosses and death. An eventually. 

I was the one who wanted it, to have a kid. It was a surprise to me and again to him. When I was little playing House at a friend’s place, I always played the husband. I would make a little tape handle and attach it to a piece of paper like a two dimensional briefcase in a two dimensional life. Honey, make my coffee, I have business to do. My friends had dolls and I had teachers calling my parents.

“She’s behaving strangely during play time.”

“What was she doing?”

“She sat in the Fisher Price Phone Booth the whole time, pretending to talk on the phone.”

“What were you doing, sweety?”

“I’m a spy, calling in suspicious activity.”

I was 5. 

It was three years ago that I started wanting to have a kid. I can’t bring myself to call it a child — it feels too precious and saccharine, too sacred and pathetic. Or maybe it just doesn’t feel like me, a woman who said in her vows how important it was to her that her groom would make a competent stunt driver. We’ll have a little yahoo, a sprite, a pain-in-the-ass. We can’t have a child. 

Sometimes I picture the photo I’ll post on Instagram, one I’ll have taken myself because my husband hates taking photos so much that he’ll never have the patience to keep taking them til I like it. It’ll be me in our bedroom, standing in front of the floor length mirror in short shorts and a crop top, making a surprise/grimace face, but a cute one, you know the one, and the caption will say, “Full of fear and progeny.” Because that will be the truth. I can’t imagine feeling hashtag blessed. I can’t imagine feeling like my life isn’t going to turn to absolute shit. Too many people have told me the truth. 

I’m a secret keeper. People can smell it on me. They corner me at the end of the bar and tell me the worst things they think because they can tell I am a vault. The truth is I am a sieve — too self-involved to carry secrets with me. I leave them on the floor of the bar, left to be buried by sweat and beer. But I carry the ones that resonate, or the ones I worry will resonate later.

Tara, mother to a 7-year-old, admitted she only just started to enjoy being a mother. That until her kid developed a personality of their own, she found it tedious and boring, like an artistic succubus. She resented her bigwig husband. He had to travel, you see, and her art was a hobby. So he had to, don’t you see?

Anya, with her baby. Sick to her stomach with anxiety. She hadn’t done anything, she said, anything. Her life was a joke and now she was trapped in it. Her body hadn’t been hers in years. It was her fourth baby. 

Or Mickey. “It fucking sucks, dude. No one will ever think you’re hot again. You can’t do shit. Don’t do it. I am telling you: don’t do it.”

And here I am, doing it, and doing it, and doing it because I’m ovulating — honey! It’s time! But I’m doing it because I want to. I hear their warnings ringing in my ears, ricocheting off the words I’m desperately trying to get down before it’s too late. Before years are lost to sleepless nights and feedings and I thought you said you were handling daycare. Before art is something I squeeze in when the baby is doing art. Or is that sleeping? Before the melody of my mind turns from jazz to lullabies. Before love for a child becomes more potent than a love for art. 

Therein lies the problem. I am bursting at the seams with wanting to love. Four animals and a husband isn’t enough for how verdant the valley of my heart feels. That is, after all, where you keep a baby. Not in the hollows where your demons lie, not in the crags breeding your anxieties, not in the spires where the clouds of dreams weave like cotton candy. The baby grows in the valley. 

I just have to remember that the novel grows everywhere else. 

---

Where to find Kelton:
Substack | Instagram

---

If you enjoyed this Artist Series feature, you may also like this one…