Permission Granted: Mary Tasillo

I met Mary Tasillo through our amazing mutual friend Johanna Marshall. After both growing up on Cape Cod, Johanna and I surprisingly discovered that we had become neighbors in West Philadelphia a couple years ago. I don't know Mary well, but from the various dinner parties we've shared in Johanna's kitchen I can attest that she is a genuinely good person. Mary seems to always have a really cool project going on too. I'm excited about checking out Soapbox, her new independent publishing center.

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I was a pretty early starter on figuring out a direction in life – not that I ever could have pictured present day Mary as 8-year-old Mary, or even 15-year-old Mary. Of course, 15-year-old Mary did not actually think she would make it past 20. She could not envision it at all. Perhaps this has freed me to feel right on target with everything I have been doing surrounding 30, since I had no notions of 30 at such a formative age.

But the pieces of me that encompass creativity, text, image-making, hand crafting, and a life surrounded by books were present early on, and coalesced after a fashion in college (by which point I’d figured out that life got better year after year and that I was definitely going to see life well past twenty). This sent me to graduate school at 24 to get an MFA in Book Arts and Printmaking. In a way this early clarity only delayed the floundering, because to pursue an arts degree is never to pursue any kind of clear career path. Which is how I found myself in and out of various jobs, interspersed with taking time off from working, throughout the latter part of my twenties, while continuing to make art, land the occasional residency, and present at arts conferences. At twenty-eight I landed a day job doing administrative work for an architect. Architects are workaholics. They don’t take any time off, and they don’t like it when you do (even though, as creative types, they like that you are an artist). By twenty-nine, I was plotting my escape from the day job for the architect. Of course, this was right after the economy tanked, and while I was very lucky to still have a job working for an architect, I was going to be hard pressed to get, for example, a job at an arts non-profit.

I’ve never been one to set practical goals. If I were, where would I be? You have to think about where you’d like to be and point yourself towards it. Thus, while working forty hours a week at a desk, and juggling occasional teaching gigs besides, I set a goal that at 30 I would make a transition into teaching and freelancing. Also, sitting at my desk one August day, I decided to start a community print space and zine library. I’d been talking around the idea with various folks for several years now, but had lost the conviction I’d had straight out of graduate school that I could be involved in making this a reality. I’m not sure what shifted that day in the late afternoon sun, but I decided that goddammit, I was going to make it happen, however that might look.

Low and behold, a few months later I met someone else who shared the vision of the community space. “Well,” we each thought, “I’m about to turn thirty so it seems like I can do something like this.” Permission granted. Permission granted to do big things and be taken seriously about it.

So at thirty, we bought a house together and started creating the groundwork for a community space on the first floor.

That same summer, at thirty, I landed enough teaching work to launch me out of the office job into the world of adjuncting and freelance. Maybe this is backwards, in certain circles, to be leaving stability and health insurance for something more piecemeal and unfinished, a choice of process over product. But in my view, the ability to keep the support under one’s feet while walking this path is a thing of beauty (if awkward at moments). Permission granted.

Thus, still early in Year 31, I find myself winding down after the inaugural event, a zine library opening and reading, for The Soapbox: Philadelphia’s Independent Publishing Center. Not even two years after that decision one August afternoon, the community print space is a reality – even if we are not yet 100% set up for community printing. My jobs consist of a combination of editorial work, teaching, book conservation, and art cataloging. And it is not the wisdom, but the permission of 30, that allowed all this to happen. (Sure, plus some leg work I put in through my twenties. The work, experimentation, and exploration I did created momentum.) Rather than serving as a benchmark, 30 has allowed me to let go of any notions of being finished, in terms of life planning and choosing a path. What a miracle to find life still getting better year after year, when 15-year-old Mary, who was finding life as an adolescent to be more difficult each year, could not envision life past 20.