A Conversation with Betsy Bertram, Writer
Living a "life of art"
Betsy Bertram’s ideas about creativity and art inform how she lives, especially now as a mer-mom (short for mermaid mom, which she thinks is better than step-mom) to her partner’s two young boys. Currently, Betsy is in school pursuing a degree in elementary education with the dream of one day opening an outdoor school. She is also a yoga teacher, kiteboarding instructor, writer, speaker, community builder, and now a co-producer on the cusp of releasing a feature documentary about her adventures and relationship with her father, who died in 2017.
I met Betsy when I was an editor at SNEWS (now Outside Business Journal) and she was leading her family’s outdoor shop, Townsend Bertram & Company, in North Carolina. We’ve worked together before on stories, so it was such a joy to talk more in depth about her creative process. She also shared about channeling her grief into a film project, learning a new medium, using trade instead of money, and healing through art.
What are your crafts?
I have been coming more and more to this idea of art of life, and how everything that we do on a daily basis can be a creative expression. I’ve been leaning into that more as I’ve stepped into the role of being a parent and not having maybe as much time for my traditional creative projects. Cooking is definitely a huge creative expression for me. My kids are really into painting right now and that’s a new medium for me. It’s been really fun to share with them my old medium of mandala making or circle drawing, which I’ve been doing since I was about 8 years old. I got them matching sketchbook journals. And then writing has always been one of my favorite creative expressions. Now I think about how I can turn school assignments or marketing work into a creative expression when I don’t have as much time for traditional creative writing.
I also picked up film in the wake of my dad dying. That was his medium of choice. I didn’t have experience or personal motivation. But finishing his project after he passed was something that I felt really drawn to do. I’ve been working with filmmaker Matthew Chenet for the last three years to finish my dad’s project. I’ve been taking the book I wrote about my dad and working with the filmmaker to turn it into the narration for the film, Captain Scott B and the Great Adventure.
What inspired you to get into film?
My dad always had a dream of making a movie. He used to have an 8mm film when he was in his 20s, and he would just film life. It’s been a really great lesson for me that you don’t have to do something spectacular, you can just film what you’re doing and it’s art because everything can be a creative expression. When he got his terminal diagnosis, it inspired him to pick up the camera again. He started filming that entire last year of his life. That was something I was really active in helping him with because I saw how happy it made him and wanted to help him fulfill that dream before his time ran out. We filmed everything from adventures to one of the world’s oldest cypress swamps and going to the coast of North Carolina to simple things like making some of his bread recipes, baking his favorite cake, riding a bike, and looking up at the sky. After he died, I knew nothing about film really and was left with my dad’s untraditional at best film style. A filmmaker reached out to me and said he’d love to make it into a feature documentary film to examine not just my dad’s way of seeing the world, but also how art is a medium for processing grief. One thing my dad made me promise on his deathbed, which has really stuck with me, is turn your grief into art. I think he did that by picking up the camera and reframing his sickness through the lens and seeing it as an offering and being able to metabolize the pain of dying young of a terminal illness to leaving something of beauty and worth behind. It has been a great offering for me and it’s helped me, given a new medium to transmute my grief. I’m really grateful for it actually.Â
Where did your dad leave off, and where did you pick up?
The film is a compilation of the footage my dad took and then new footage of me going to all the places I went with my dad during that last year for my own healing and to rediscover whatever magic he saw in those spaces. It’s the combination of my writing as the narration, interviews with people who were on those last adventures with him, recordings of my dad, and images of the natural world that I think speak the loudest in the film. I love that there’s beautiful outdoor adventure videos out there and great films of people doing incredible things with their bodies out in the natural world. A reality is that the majority of people won’t have experiences like that. The majority of people aren’t going to hike to the top of Everest. What I love about what the filmmaker has captured and what my dad captured is that anything outside, even if it’s just a walk in your neighborhood or bike ride around the block, can be an absolutely transformational adventure. It has hit especially hard during the pandemic when we aren’t able to travel to faraway places as easily as we once were able to and rediscover the adventure that awaits right outside your door every day. There’s this idea from the book Mating in Captivity by Esther Perel around how you don’t have to go to new places, you just have to see with new eyes. It’s the idea that you can experience something new even in a place you’ve been to hundreds of times. By going to the place, you see more and more. That was true for me.
What was challenging about this project, both emotionally and from a learning perspective?
It was the hardest creative project I’ve ever done. Part of that was because collaboration is really challenging in a creative space. It’s hard to practice non-attachment and work with artists in different mediums. Writing is so different than film. With film, the writing can be far more sparse because there’s so much visual aid and that’s part of the storytelling. One of the greatest gifts of this project has been learning the power of collaboration and the power of my artistic expression, which isn’t necessarily something I have to do in one sitting or even over the period of a year. This has also been the longest creative project I’ve ever done. It’s taught me that when you really commit to your art and you are patient, the reward is great despite the challenges along the way. It was great to have a filmmaker who was willing to take the time to distill a lot of writing into what he has called narrative poetry.
Learn more about the film at captainscottb.com or on Instagram at @scott_b_film.
Has it been healing?Â
Parts of it have been extremely painful because in creating the film, it’s been necessary for the art that I return to really hard spaces and challenging parts of my own grief journey. It’s been extremely healing. It’s strange but also beautiful and such a gift to be able to literally see myself move from deep sadness to reawakening to the beauty that is life. It was easy for me in the wake of losing my dad to really lose a sense of passion for life. So much of my passion for life was connected to my relationship with him, especially being with him so much in the last year of his life. I love the phrase that grief is love with nowhere to go, and the project gave me a place to put that love and to channel that sense of love into something that will help other people deal with grief. Grief is the universal human experience and that’s only been further illuminated by the pandemic. COVID has been a huge grieving experience for the whole world.
What has been surprising to you throughout your creative journey?Â
What I’ve realized in both the making of this film and in doing art with kids is that we are all born artists. I think it’s easy for life to put more relevance or more importance on productivity or things that feed us financially. I’ve found that the non-material benefits of creativity, such as in mood and connection to self/others/natural world, are so valuable. The payoff that I get when I hold space for creativity pays back tenfold. Especially right now, with the amount of time we’re all spending in front of screens with the pandemic, creativity is an antidote to the technological exhaustion. It refills us in ways that I think are really needed right now. So even when I think I don’t have time, I challenge myself to carve out that time and space and trust that the benefit I get from it will be so great it will make all the other tasks easier.Â
See more of Betsy’s work and connect with her at betsybertram.com.
Financially, how did you make the film possible?
It was uncomfortable asking people to contribute financially to a project that I really believed in, but required a bigger budget because of its scale. That was a really good edge for me. I realized that people want to support creative endeavors that speak to them. There’s nothing wrong in asking even if it doesn’t generate what you hoped or wanted. We needed help to make the project possible. I was really touched by the donations from individuals as well as from companies like Fjällräven who got out checkbooks and were really excited to support a creative project that was outside of the box. That makes me really hopeful for the future for us all being able to do that.Â
Do you have any other thoughts on money tied to creativity?
Aside from the film, I am a person who stays open to whatever opportunities come my way. I dabble in a lot of things and that has helped me be able to do more creative things because I’m not fully committed financially to a corporate job. I also recognize I’m able to do a lot of creative things in my life and take a lot of risks because being a white woman growing up in America, I’ve had a lot of ease. A skill that I’ve honed that I’m really proud of is what my dad called scraping the peanut butter jar. He taught me there are two ways to make money: You either make it or you save it. In this capitalistic, consumerist society, I’ve been looking at what I can live without. I value my flexibility more than money and material things.
I’m also a huge proponent of trade. Women are especially good at this. It could be trading people yoga classes for whatever their skills are. Everybody has a skill that somebody else values. We don’t always have to be trading with money. I love kids so for years I had a trade with my yoga teachers. I took care of their kids in exchange for yoga classes. It’s thinking about things you want in your life and the skills you have to offer. How can you create mutually beneficial trade that everybody feels good about? Those creative trades are the future of a sustainable economy.
When people see something made by you, what do you want them to take away from it?
I want people to feel that some part of themselves is being healed by engaging with the creative thing—not just something that I’ve made, but art itself. What I’ve realized in the making of the film is that art is one of the most powerful ways we have as humans to heal and to help heal each other. I’m reading this book called Entangled Life about mycelium networks and the fungal world. All of the relationships are symbiotic and art is this beautiful way that humans can exist. If you just see a picture someone made or get a card in the mail that someone painted, it’s a way that we can live symbiotically and heal and help one another without necessarily ever being in the same physical space. I love the potential it offers.Â
Captain Scott B and the Great Adventure is an independent feature documentary in-the-making, produced and filmed across the state of North Carolina, with a tentative release date of Summer 2021. To learn more about the film, meet the team, and learn about potential collaboration opportunities, check out the film on-line at captainscottb.com.
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