Speaker 1: I always say that I'm mediocre at a lot of things,
Speaker 1: and I'm exceptional at puns. It's just something that my
Speaker 1: dad and I have a super freaky talent for. I'm
Speaker 1: by no means a poet or words smith's in other ways.
Speaker 1: I have no idea why I have such a talent
Speaker 1: with puns. Merrily Grashion is many things. An illustrator, a
Speaker 1: flourishing author, a strong but modest woman. There's something effortless
Speaker 1: about the way she describes her career that could lead
Speaker 1: one to believe it's been easy to be fair. It
Speaker 1: might just have been the day that I caught up
Speaker 1: with her. This was Merrily's twelfth day in Los Angeles,
Speaker 1: recently relocating from New York City, and she's still wrapping
Speaker 1: her head around a few things. What began a spontaneous
Speaker 1: sketches during her early days bussing and waiting tables has
Speaker 1: developed into a small business called Great and Potatoes, which
Speaker 1: produces humorous screening cards and prints featuring food and beverage
Speaker 1: theme drawings and cons Merrily has also written and illustrated
Speaker 1: a book called Women's Libation, a whimsical celebration of women
Speaker 1: history and cocktails. All of this in a fairly impressive
Speaker 1: window of time. But don't tell her it's impressive. I've
Speaker 1: just always drawn. I studied art a ton, I studied
Speaker 1: our history and are a lot of art theory and
Speaker 1: art for political change. But as far as skill, I'm
Speaker 1: always learning and getting better. By the end of the book,
Speaker 1: I had just picked up a bunch of new skills
Speaker 1: just in drawing. But no, I haven't. I'm not like trained.
Speaker 1: On this edition of On the Job, I'm speaking remotely
Speaker 1: with Merrily gression to hear more about her career as
Speaker 1: an entrepreneur, a creative person, and her personal journey that
Speaker 1: has taken her to Los Angeles. By embracing opportunities and
Speaker 1: connecting her work experiences in the service industry, Merrily has
Speaker 1: nurtured her raw talent as an artist to find herself
Speaker 1: in a favorable position of choosing what will come next.
Speaker 1: I've spent more than the last twelve years in New
Speaker 1: York City, where I moved right after high school, kind
Speaker 1: of supported my way through college, working in bars and
Speaker 1: restaurants primarily, actually just applied to one college out of
Speaker 1: New York, and it's the kind of typical liberal arts introduction,
Speaker 1: and then you know, got like coffee shop, rasta jobs,
Speaker 1: a lot of serving waters saying, and then I found
Speaker 1: my home and a restaurant and really learned about food
Speaker 1: and wine and just got really excited about it. It
Speaker 1: wasn't just a job. I was actually learning a ton
Speaker 1: about the history of This was a Spanish restaurant, so
Speaker 1: I learned a lot about Spanish wine cuisine. But I
Speaker 1: also was finishing my thesis in college and working all
Speaker 1: the time and studying all the time. Naturally, merrily was
Speaker 1: developing a love for food and wine while working in restaurants.
Speaker 1: But I was curious to understand where this crossed paths
Speaker 1: with illustration and art. I started interning with Just Seeds,
Speaker 1: which is a national artist collective of I think around
Speaker 1: twenty artists all over the country. But I was working
Speaker 1: directly with Josh McPhee, and he's a primarily printmaker, but
Speaker 1: he's an organizer and activist, teacher and curator. I learned
Speaker 1: a lot from him about the idea of passing around
Speaker 1: affordable art. And I was just kind of an intern,
Speaker 1: but I really learned a ton about kind of just
Speaker 1: the process, but also the history of making art for
Speaker 1: political change. So I was working a ton and bars
Speaker 1: and restaurants. I was studying, and I was making my
Speaker 1: own art but just doodles mostly, and then working with
Speaker 1: this really inspiring artists and organized our an activists, and
Speaker 1: it all just kind of came together, meeting the best
Speaker 1: people and then who inspired me to keep making art,
Speaker 1: and then learning that wow, I don't want anything to
Speaker 1: do with the actual art world in the gallery kind
Speaker 1: of capacity, because it's just not accessible. It's just it's
Speaker 1: everything I don't believe in in terms of what art
Speaker 1: can be, because I worked with this artist who really
Speaker 1: taught me or is for the people, not something that
Speaker 1: shouldn't be accessible. Anyone looking through Merrily's body of work
Speaker 1: would find it evident that she's embraced this concept and
Speaker 1: aesthetic and made it into her own by never being
Speaker 1: overly precious or serious. At some of the bars and
Speaker 1: restaurants I worked, I would start drawing these little playful cards,
Speaker 1: just doodles. I would see a bottle of Apperall and
Speaker 1: write apper All, we've been through or for net and
Speaker 1: say her net about it, or You've always given me
Speaker 1: a reasoning to stay, And then I pass out the
Speaker 1: cards and I just started I was I've always been
Speaker 1: a compulsive doodler, so I would just start drawing these
Speaker 1: cards and became a whole series that would just live
Speaker 1: in my handbag. I like to call them dad jokes.
Speaker 1: And I was drawing um a lot at work, the
Speaker 1: different bars and restaurants I worked at, and passing them
Speaker 1: out to friends and co workers and patrons at the
Speaker 1: bar or whatever. And I my friends encouraged me to
Speaker 1: start a greeting card line and that developed into a
Speaker 1: few years ago, I started a company called greet and
Speaker 1: Potatoes like Meat and Potatoes as a greeting card company,
Speaker 1: and they were all food and beverage themed greeting cards
Speaker 1: that we're kind of for all occasions. But they were
Speaker 1: set from illustrations of mine, and I worked with my
Speaker 1: friend Emily Johnson, She's a Bushwick based printmaker, making it
Speaker 1: something that was really personal, super playful, but affordable and
Speaker 1: something you could really literally just pass around and you know,
Speaker 1: get for less than ten dollars or five dollars, so
Speaker 1: you know, not a whole lot of money in that obviously,
Speaker 1: but it was it was cool to know I could
Speaker 1: be doing it with people in my community, other strong women.
Speaker 1: And then a lot of stores started picking up the
Speaker 1: cards in a bunch of kind of independent brick and
Speaker 1: mortar stores around Brooklyn and some scattered around the US,
Speaker 1: and I started selling them online. So that was kind
Speaker 1: of how that started. And then two years ago somebody
Speaker 1: picked him up and did a big BuzzFeed feature on them,
Speaker 1: and that was Alison Roman. She put that article out
Speaker 1: and I totally changed my life. I got all these
Speaker 1: people in the publishing world and agents reaching out to me, like,
Speaker 1: what are you doing with your art? Come on, makes
Speaker 1: more stuff? And I'm guessing her agent, Jannis Donned, was
Speaker 1: one of those people. She was just one of the
Speaker 1: most seasoned professional literary agents in especially in the food
Speaker 1: and beverage world. And she sat me down and she said,
Speaker 1: I really like your art, and I know you have
Speaker 1: some more good ideas. Let's make a book. And I
Speaker 1: was like, funny, you should say. I have this idea
Speaker 1: about ladies who also have funny cocktail names. And before
Speaker 1: I knew it had eight to ten pages mocked up
Speaker 1: and was selling this idea to a bunch of publishers.
Speaker 1: Came out in the fall of two thousand seventeen called
Speaker 1: Women's Libation. It's a cocktail guide cocktails to celebrate a
Speaker 1: woman's right to booze. So it's all comes from my
Speaker 1: illustrations and kind of riffs on classic cocktails, each one
Speaker 1: dedicated to a influential woman in history or kind of
Speaker 1: landmark in the history of women's liberation. So that was
Speaker 1: kind of the last project I worked on in New
Speaker 1: York and moving over here to l A, I've kind
Speaker 1: of started thinking about a lot of new projects, creative
Speaker 1: being not necessarily the same, but a lot of creative
Speaker 1: ideas more with Merrily the illustrator turned author after this
Speaker 1: one company is on a mission to put a million
Speaker 1: people to work each year. Sounds like a big number,
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Speaker 1: labor position or administrative work. Maybe you're an executive looking
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Speaker 1: In my conversation with Merrily Grassien, who developed a small
Speaker 1: print card business, while bartending and waiting tables in New
Speaker 1: York City and is now a burgeoning author. The journey
Speaker 1: of becoming an author artist, it's all been tied into
Speaker 1: the interdisciplinary parts of New York artistic life that come
Speaker 1: back to supporting yourself in a restaurant, working in bars
Speaker 1: and restaurants in hospitality. It's a well known dilemma for artists,
Speaker 1: balancing the production of creative work and the business side
Speaker 1: of things. I asked Merrily how she was able to
Speaker 1: keep managing eating potatoes while writing a book. I kind
Speaker 1: of shelved it for a bit. When I was working
Speaker 1: on the book, I was still sending out online orders.
Speaker 1: Because as much as I love drawing and I love
Speaker 1: this company, I've loved building this company and the learning
Speaker 1: experience of it. I'm not really a business person at all.
Speaker 1: So working on something like a book where I had
Speaker 1: a whole team of people doing not only like the
Speaker 1: business end of it, the editing and production and whatever,
Speaker 1: a couple of years or I was trying to figure
Speaker 1: out how much profit, how much the percentage of profiting,
Speaker 1: and obviously not paying myself for labor. I would rather
Speaker 1: just be the creative I'm better at that too, and
Speaker 1: the book was happening, and I was kind of putting
Speaker 1: Green and Potatoes on hold. Clarkson Potter is in the
Speaker 1: publishing world, but they do more kind of gifty kinds
Speaker 1: of art and prints, and they contacted me and Weeds
Speaker 1: partnered up and they are taking over production of Green
Speaker 1: and Potatoes. Were launching a twelve card pack that will
Speaker 1: be much wider distributed, um maybe of an internationally distributed.
Speaker 1: You can just find it in a lot more places,
Speaker 1: so it's not just me sitting on my living room
Speaker 1: for stuffing envelopes. Will be able to get these cards
Speaker 1: out there to a lot more people. They're still printed
Speaker 1: really beautifully, so it's really exciting. I'm excited to see
Speaker 1: where that goes. Merely identified her creative strengths and weaknesses
Speaker 1: and sought partnerships to help fill the voids and relied
Speaker 1: on separate teams for both her company and the completion
Speaker 1: of her book. I would not have been able to
Speaker 1: do it without them. And then my editor, she and
Speaker 1: I got really close, and she's she's like a right
Speaker 1: brained version of I guess the left brained version of me.
Speaker 1: So she was my editor, so she would look at
Speaker 1: a piece of paper that looked chaotic, and she would
Speaker 1: just make it make sense. She was like the oil
Speaker 1: to the machine, like she just made it run. Gave
Speaker 1: me the confidence to keep working and being creative, and
Speaker 1: she's inspired me to like take all of these crazy,
Speaker 1: jumbled ideas and talents I have and put them on
Speaker 1: paper and maybe hopefully make it into something that somebody
Speaker 1: else can relate to and put a book finding on it.
Speaker 1: Women's Libation gracefully combines charming artwork with coherent cocktail instruction
Speaker 1: and is packed with so much clever wordplay and twists
Speaker 1: on established historical names like Vermouth, Bader, Ginsburg, Joan of Ark,
Speaker 1: and Stormy Florence, Nightcap, and Gale, all in the spirit
Speaker 1: of celebrating women who have impacted the world. My biggest
Speaker 1: achievement has absolutely been completing writing this book. There's the
Speaker 1: journey I went on from sitting in my agent's office
Speaker 1: and having this tiny idea for a book and hers
Speaker 1: telling me to mock up a couple of pages two
Speaker 1: in less than a year, coming up with seventy recipes
Speaker 1: and accompany kind of like biographical blurbs on these women,
Speaker 1: and just the research that went into it and just
Speaker 1: getting really excited about something kind of silly, which is
Speaker 1: just like a cocktail book, or you can kind of
Speaker 1: playful that a project like this can mean something and
Speaker 1: has meant something to a lot of people. Strangers, friends,
Speaker 1: friends of friends have reached out to me out of
Speaker 1: nowhere and just saying I really needed this book right now.
Speaker 1: It really felt like people were as excited about it
Speaker 1: as I was making it, and makes me want to
Speaker 1: just do more stuff like that. And I'm not quite
Speaker 1: sure what yet, but I'm excited to explore it. I'm
Speaker 1: sure fans and followers of Merrily's work are two, so
Speaker 1: as being in Los Angeles part of a new chapter
Speaker 1: in her own life. I'm thinking about this move to
Speaker 1: l A as an eventual bicoastal life that I'm not
Speaker 1: sure it's achievable, but that would be my dream. Something
Speaker 1: I've always wanted to do is open my own bar.
Speaker 1: I have a bunch of experience, I really know what
Speaker 1: I can really envision what would work for me at least,
Speaker 1: so that might be in my near future as well.
Speaker 1: But coming out here, it's on this like Hiatus was
Speaker 1: in some part inspired by coming out with this book
Speaker 1: and realizing, Okay, well this is done. I want to
Speaker 1: keep this momentum going. Can I do that if I
Speaker 1: don't have another deadline set and rather than waiting around,
Speaker 1: keep that momentum going onward upward, try something new, shake
Speaker 1: things up. I left New York kind of heartbroken. Leaving
Speaker 1: New York. I'm in love with it, but I'm glad
Speaker 1: I left it that way where I can come back
Speaker 1: any time, and I don't really mind being in cars.
Speaker 1: I can listen to podcasts. I'm Liz Reagan. And that
Speaker 1: was Merrily Gression. And that's all for this edition of
Speaker 1: On the Job. Find more at Express prose dot com,
Speaker 1: and you can listen to every podcast this season at
Speaker 1: express pros dot com. Forward Slash Podcast. This podcast is
Speaker 1: produced by Decibel Studios in New York, I Heart Radio
Speaker 1: and Red Seat Ventures. You can subscribe on iHeart Radio
Speaker 1: and iTunes, where we hope you'll leave a nice review
Speaker 1: that helps other folks find us. And of course you
Speaker 1: can listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. See
Speaker 1: you next time On the Job mmm