Ballerina in the sand.

Learning from an artist who chose to live and work on her own terms.

Marta dancing at the Amargosa Opera House.

My first encounter with the specter of Marta Becket took place between the pages of Nicolette Polek’s book, Bitter Water Opera, in which the protagonist makes a pilgrimage to the Amargosa Opera House and has an awakening akin to encountering God that reinvigorates her life and creativity. Shortly after finishing the slim tome, I googled Marta Becket, falling down the rabbit hole of search results, quietly wondering how in the world I had never heard of this woman before. She seemed to me something entirely out of fiction, her story so unique and fantastical that it had to be dreamed up—but she was, in fact, real.

“...if Marta Becket were not a real person - then the whole oddball-in-the-desert scenario might seem like something dreamed up by David Lynch. Or Sam Shepard.” — Northern California Bohemian

Perhaps that was my initial draw to Marta—the Lynchian mystery of her life and legacy that took place not far from where I grew up, deep in the Mojave Desert. As I sifted through articles and information about Marta’s life and work, it became clear that not only did she create something fantastical and otherwordly in the most unexpected of places, but she didn’t compromise. In a world that constantly forces creative people to bend to the wills of algorithms, marketing, publishers, galleries, and so on, Marta said to hell with it all. She chose to build an opera house in the middle of nowhere where she would go on to create her life, her true magnum opus, away from the public’s prying eyes.

Marta began her career the same way she ended it: as an anomaly. She didn’t start taking ballet lessons until she was fourteen, which, if you are familiar with the often problematic culture of ballet, is considered by most within that industry to be “too late.” But in true trailblazer fashion, Marta excelled, making her way to Broadway and Radio City Music Hall, performing in a handful of shows before taking her one-woman pantomime on tour. Her discovery of Death Valley Junction was one of pure chance. En route to the location of her next performance, Marta and her husband, Thomas Williams, got a flat tire while driving through the small community. While they waited for it to be fixed, she wandered around the town, stumbling upon the old abandoned auditorium built by the Pacific Coast Borax Company. She recalls at that moment feeling like “[she] was looking at the other half of [her] life,” and she decided to stay then and there.¹

“At that moment, for me, the world could have New York. I wanted this theater.”

Badwater Basin. Ed and I once visited while driving through Death Valley years ago. It was cold and unbelievably quiet, and the ground was covered in salty, mineral-rich dirt that had dried and cracked into sharp puzzle-like pieces that curled slightly at the edges. With each step, I heard and felt the satisfying crack of the dried earth beneath me.

If you aren’t intimately familiar with Death Valley’s landscape, let me paint a picture: on its surface, it is vast, desolate, and unkind. It belongs to and was born from the landscape of the Mojave Desert, like Eve born from the proverbial rib of Adam, spanning roughly 47,000 square miles and crossing four state lines. Although Death Valley is a mere 3,000 square miles of that 47,000, it remains a force to be reckoned with. It is said to be the driest place in North America and has the highest recorded temperature in the world, which rose to a staggering 136 degrees in 1936. Some say in the summertime, it is the hottest place on earth.

Despite its hardened exterior, within this desert lives abundantly fertile ground, fed by soft mineral-laden alluvial fans and puzzling leftovers from previous periods. A verdant carpet of wildflowers blooms across the landscape each spring, nourished by frigid snowmelt carried in rivulets from the surrounding crown of mountains. There are springs and ponds tucked into corners of its topography; Salt Creek contains the famed Death Valley pupfish, a rare species of small fish that evolved to endure harsh conditions and is a remnant of the Pleistocene era. It is home to Big Horned sheep and Red Tail hawks. It is rampant, overflowing, with biodiversity—all of which lies just beneath the surface, away from the prying eyes of visitors, revealing itself only to those curious enough to stay and look for it. Marta was one of these people, and like the unexpectedly fertile land she chose to build her life upon, she found an equally fertile landscape for her art to crescendo and thrive, tucked away from the rest of the world.

As I continue to write on Substack, something that’s plagued me is the balance we are forced to strike as creative people between constant output and giving our projects the time and care they need before releasing them into the wild. Writing this piece took two weeks, from conception to research to the actual writing process. Great art takes time, and great writing, especially fiction, seems to me the antithesis of what social platforms (even Substack, unfortunately) want, because it is inherently slow. It takes time for characters to form and plots to marinate. You must tinker with words until they fit just so and incubate ideas and story arcs until they begin to take shape. That process, in my opinion, cannot be rushed.

In her 2022 essay On Writing and the Business of Writing, writer Carmen Maria Machado touches briefly on a similar thread as she describes the rare opportunity the MFA program provides aspiring writers with to simply engage in the writing process, without worrying about any of the logistics and business aspects of the industry. More than anything, MFA programs provide a container to nurture these long-term projects, allowing the young writer to revel in the glorious act of creation—just as a person deeply in love with the work should. The problem arises, Machado argues, when we try to accelerate that process, which results in plagiarism scandals like the one surrounding Jumi Bello several years back.

Reading these words from the voice of an established writer whose work I greatly admire was comforting because it revealed that no one—not even those who have managed to find success within it—wants to live in a world that moves at the pace of our current one. Aside from billionaires and corporate giants, it doesn't serve anyone. Certainly not writers and artists.

"But, I am also reminded of the bleating of writers who insist that they “need” to be on social media for their careers, even when social media is draining them of time and energy and the will to create. Even when it makes them miserable and crazy. They are told by their publisher or their peers that they need to be “engaged” and “have a following” in order to sell books (or, at least, they insist their publisher or peers have said this), and so they end up turning over their thoughts and words, for free, to a corporation that doesn’t give a shit if they live or die, instead of writing the book that burns inside of them. What a fucking tragedy. What an absolute waste.”

Marta, dancing in the desert (source)

I used to think the artists’ role in our society remained too passive to make significant change, especially within political climates like the one we live in currently. It may feel passive now, perhaps even futile, to create anything with the looming threat of a force as heavy as fascism. But all acts of creation become radical within this climate—a climate that is increasingly ravaged by poverty, artificial intelligence, climate change, a militarized police force, misinformation, and institutionalized racism, among other byproducts of capitalism and greed. Creating art within these often debilitating circumstances—that is, making time for something other than your own survival as the very fabric of our society unravels—is one of the most challenging yet powerful things you can do. And I cannot help but look at creation, this defiant act of prospering and finding a space for yourself amidst the harshest and cruelest circumstances, and compare it to what Marta Becket found in Death Valley, a place once considered uninhabitable.

This denial to conform, the refusal to submit, which I’ve come face to face with via the spirit of Marta, is the force behind it all: activism, creativity, being alive. When everyone around her was, presumably, following the rules of the art game—seeking gallery representation, staying in New York to be on Broadway—Marta, en pointe, put her silk-slippered foot down and said no. She didn’t want that life. She wanted something completely different. People probably told her repeatedly that her career would be over if she left. Look how wrong they were. I’m sure you’ve figured it out by now, but I’m not just talking about art when I say that we don’t have to take any of this shit. We really don’t.

“Is it eccentric to love your work so much that you would go anywhere in the world to do it?” — Marta Becket in the an interview with The New York Times

The Amargosa Opera House still stands, and I plan to make my pilgrimage soon. According to rumors, the hotel’s rooms are haunted—by Marta, her husband Thomas Williams, by people who loved and lived and created within the hotel’s walls. Her ashes, lovingly scattered around the property after her death in 2017, were mixed with wildflower seeds that bloom each year so she may endlessly pirouette throughout the opera house’s halls. In this case, “haunting” doesn’t seem to be the right word, and the archivists and preservationists of the opera house agree, disliking it when people make these claims. Even if this is all fiction, a fanciful story spun from nothing by ghosthunters and impressionable visitors, there must be something of Marta’s spirit left within those walls. Because when you devote yourself to your creative pursuits with the religious devotion of something holy—your spirit, your essence, will permeate everything you create. The artist is present, alive and breathing, in everything they accomplished in their lifetime. Almost a decade after her death, the inspiring force of her passionate and uncompromising creativity feels vibrant and teeming with life.

We can learn from this bravery and defiance and turn away from a world that forces us to go against our nature. A world that has, over time, made it feel impossible to avoid endless self-promotion and marketing, that forces us to give in to capitalism and abandon our joys, to cease having the time and space to do the very thing we started promoting. To internalize the notion that our art is useless if it fails to produce capital. A world that harmfully ties us to places—real and digital—that drain us of our spirit and vitality. Marta refused and created a version of the artist’s life that was uniquely hers. We also have the right to refuse. Poet and essayist Anne Boyer writes:

“History is full of people who just didn’t. They said no thank you, turned away, ran away to the desert, stood on the streets in rags, lived in barrels, burned down their houses, walked barefoot through town, killed their rapists, pushed away dinner, and meditated into the light. Even babies refuse, and the elderly too. All types of animals refuse: at the zoo they gaze dead-eyed through plexiglass, fling feces at the human faces, stop having babies. Classes refuse. The poor throw their lives onto barricades. Workers slow the line. Enslaved people have always refused, poisoning the feasts, aborting the embryos. And the diligent, flamboyant jaywalkers assert themselves against the traffic as the first and foremost visible, daily lesson in just not.”

I am reminded of all the times I told myself something wasn’t possible because of the fraught constructs of our world. The countless times I thought I couldn’t be a writer because I didn’t have an MFA or journalism background. All the times I told myself that I needed to constantly be active on social media because if I wasn’t, I was hindering my career, and would fade into irrelevance as a result. My mind often repeated a belief that wasn’t my own, that creating for the sake of creating wasn’t enough, that art had to produce something tangible—money, recognition, approval—to matter. But Marta’s legacy punches holes through all of these beliefs so that they cease to hold any water, presenting them plainly in their falsehood.

Marta didn’t have a blueprint. She didn’t seek institutional validation or rely on an audience to tell her she was worthy. She put on a show every weekend with or without an audience, and created because she had to, because it burned inside of her, because it was her way of existing in a world that was, and still is, cruel and unkind. And she reminds us that this kind of creation—uncompromising, unmarketable, untethered from expectation—is still possible. Whether the opera house found success or not, Marta insists she would remain there until the end:

“I would still be here struggling to support my art. This is not because I think my art to be great, it is because my art is so necessary to me.”

We must untether ourselves from the institutions, the desire for recognition, the stoking of our desperate egos, and begin the humbling task of creating because we have no other choice. To write stories that reveal the incandescent and kaleidoscopic joys of life as well as humanity’s hubris, to create art that lives beyond us and transcends time. Sometimes, at our very lowest, when we feel we have nothing else, this work emboldens us to get up every morning. We must create because it is the force that drives us forward when the world feels depraved. It was necessary then—now, it is more necessary than ever.

1. The Pahrump Valley Times.