Well Hey There

I’M MALLORY

I’M A SELF-TAUGHT ARTIST, ROCKY MOUNTAIN HOMESTEADER, FORMER ROAD-WARRIOR, AND THE WOMAN BEHIND HANDMADE HAPPINESS — TEACHING EVERYDAY CREATIVES THAT THE BRAVE THING AND THE BEAUTIFUL THING ARE ALMOST ALWAYS THE SAME THING.

Very into: slow Sunday mornings, noisy garden days with the kids, and realizing it’s never late to follow your dreams. Avoiding small talk since 1984.

My creative story began the way many of ours do… on the floor with a pile of crayons and a head full of wild ideas.

By the age of six, I had announced — with full conviction — that I was going to grow up to be a circus performer, a writer, AND an artist. I was going to read all morning, do daring acrobatic things in the afternoon, and paint my heart out every evening.

But like most of us, somewhere around fifth grade, I started doubting myself. I couldn’t draw realistic faces. My horses came out looking like potato-shaped goats. I decided I just wasn’t talented enough, and quietly tucked the artist dream into a drawer.

I kept the writer dream. The artist one I left behind for almost twenty-five years.

I went on to do a whole lot of things I had dreamed about as a kid — just not in the order anyone (especially me) expected.


I attended circus school. (Yes, really.) I tightrope-walked across crevasses in a discipline called highlining. I made friends with talented acrobats and helped teach students from around the world at festivals.

I lived and traveled in a vintage VW van across the country with a Labrador named Baylor — my best friend, my road dog, my heart in a yellow fur suit.

And then, at age 30, I did the thing that ended up rerouting my entire life:

I bought a motorcycle, taught myself to ride it, attached a sidecar to it, put Baylor in the seat, and rode it across North America.

After the motorcycle trip, I went home and got married to a man I knew I’d marry within about six weeks of meeting him.


I went back to my freelance writing career — which had quietly turned into a very successful corporate writing career while I wasn’t paying close attention.

And here’s the thing nobody tells you: you can climb the same ladder twice. I had escaped the corporate dream-turned-nightmare in my twenties, and somehow, in my thirties, I’d climbed right back up it.

Different ladder. Same slow, quiet feeling that some part of me was going dim.

So we took the next wild leap.

In 2019 my husband and I packed up our 1-year-old daughter and moved to an off-grid hunting cabin
in the middle of the Rocky Mountains.


No running water. No neighbors for miles. A wood stove for heat. A long, dirt-road drive to anywhere.

Some people thought we’d lost our minds. We hadn’t. We had finally — finally — found them.

But that doesn’t mean it was easy. It wasn’t. Building a homestead, chasing a toddler while pregnant, hauling water, cooking outside on a camp stove. Everyday was challenging, but worth it to build something we love.

What I did not expect was that the cabin was where, one quiet morning, I would do the thing nine-year-old me had been waiting twenty-five years for me to do:

I picked up a paintbrush.

  • These were the first paintings I was proud enough of to take pictures. The very first paintings were even worse than these!

The Worst Paintings I’ve Ever Made (Were the Most Important)

I want to say that more than once, because I think it matters: my first paintings were bad. Not “humble brag” bad. Not “she’s just being modest” bad. Genuinely, objectively, look-at-this-mess bad. The colors were muddy. The shapes were lumpy. The proportions made my children laugh.

But I kept going. Because something underneath the bad paintings felt good in a way nothing else had felt good in years. Painting quieted the loud part of my brain. Painting made the cabin feel like home. Painting made me feel like myself again — not the corporate writer version, not the perfect-mom version, not the “successful adult” version. The kid-on-the-floor-with-crayons version. The version that had been waiting in a drawer for twenty-five years.

And here’s what I want every woman reading this to know:

The ugly first painting isn’t proof you’re not an artist. It’s proof you’re brave enough to start.

Subtitle here

Module Three

The Practical Path (Take Two)

After the motorcycle trip came o an end, I got married to a man I knew I’d marry within about six weeks of meeting him.

We had babies. I went back to my freelance writing career — which had quietly turned into a very successful corporate writing career while I wasn’t paying close attention.
And here’s the thing nobody tells you: you can climb the same ladder twice. I had escaped the corporate dream-turned-nightmare in my twenties, and somehow, in my thirties, I’d climbed right back up it. Different ladder. Same fluorescent lights. Same Zoom meetings. Same slow, quiet feeling that some part of me was going dim.
So we did the next ridiculous thing.