Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Tess Dodd. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Hi Tess, thanks for joining us today. Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?
When I was a kid, I always swore that I would never work in an office. It just seemed so… mundane. I couldn’t imagine sitting in a little cubicle doing who knows what on a computer all day everyday.
What did I want to do? Well, that changed. A lot. I think my first real career goal was to become a veterinarian. That lasted until I found out I’d likely have to put animals to sleep. It’s possible the dream of singer/songwriter came next. I remember writing songs and making up dances with my neighborhood friends and putting on shows at our street’s block parties (are those even a thing anymore?). Other options included homicide detective (until I read that you first have to be a police officer) and teacher (until I realized I wasn’t big on kids).
This carried on until I was in high school, at which point I still had no idea what my “calling” was, if people really have those. By my senior year, I had quite a rough relationship with school. My grades were okay. Average. But I didn’t really care about them and I couldn’t wait to get out of there. I’d been in private Catholic schools for thirteen years and man, do they have a lot of rules. Sure, I received a good education, but all those standards and that rigidity really tainted my perspective on school. I decided to take a gap year after graduating. And then that gap year turned into two.
It was the end of January 2009 when I found out I was pregnant. I was twenty. I didn’t have many plans for my future at this time, but getting pregnant wasn’t one of them. After a healthy amount of panicking, I began weighing my options. I considered the different paths I could take. In the end, I chose to follow through with the pregnancy and keep the baby (and I now have the world’s best thirteen year old to show for it). After all, I had been in a relationship with his dad for two years. It was after making that decision that I thought maybe it was time to go to school. I applied, was accepted, and enrolled at our local community college.
Fast forward to autumn of 2009, and I’m starting my first ever semester of college while massively pregnant. Turns out, when able to choose what I study, I actually quite enjoy school and am passionate about learning. The problem was, I still had no more clarity on what I wanted to do. Why do we push our kids so hard to make these huge decisions at such a young age? And why do we act as though we must choose one thing to pursue and one thing only? Sure, technically I was an adult, but I really was still just a kid. Again, I found myself frustrated with rules, albeit unspoken societal ones.
Because I felt like I had to choose something to major in, I went with English. I decided I would be a professor at a university and teach adults. Because adults are better than children, right? Wrong. Turns out adults are actually worse in many ways. I mean, adults are supposed to have learned right from wrong and kind from unkind and pleasant from obnoxious. Right??? Again, wrong.
After this earth-shattering revelation, I turned to business. I would become a small business owner. Think coffee shop plus book shop plus flower shop. I even wrote an entire business plan for my shop, Bluebird Books & Café. Well, after a couple semesters down into that program, I came to the conclusion that business classes are actually quite a bore.
On the bright side, while I’d been studying business, I’d taken an Introduction to Photography course as an elective. And I fell in love. Deeply, madly in love. Mostly with 35mm film photography and the darkroom. Not so much digital. All the technology stressed me out and I didn’t enjoy learning it. But the smell of the fixer and stop bath chemicals? The unknown? The suspense? The trial and error? Yes, I could imagine doing that forever.
So there it was: my passion. My goal. My dream. To be a photographer.
Unfortunately, while pursuing my photography degree, I came upon the realization that only certain types of photographers can (somewhat) easily make a living. I’m sure there’s a whole slew of photography jobs that pay a reliable, living wage, but in my mind it came down to two: teaching and weddings. Well, since the arts aren’t valued as much by our society as other sectors, no one was really hiring photography instructors full-time anymore. And weddings? No thank you. I only needed to shoot a few to decide that I had zero interest in doing that.
So after all that, it felt like I was back to square one. And I had a kid to support! It was 2013 by this time and I was a single parent. It wasn’t just myself to think about.
While all that was happening, I took a job as a student employee in the library of the community college I was attending. Even though it was an academic library, I enjoyed it. I worked there for three years. I kept taking more classes because I knew that if I stopped, I’d lose my job. But eventually I knew I had to move on. I graduated, left, and got a position as Assistant Manager in a retail shop at the mall. It was fun but it wasn’t forever. The schedule was tricky to maintain as a young mom and then, after a few short months, the store announced it was permanently closing.
It wasn’t long after this that I heard about a full-time, benefitted position opening up in the library where I’d been employed as a student. Pros? I loved that job. And did I mention it was full-time? With benefits? That would be ideal. But the biggest con? It was an office job. The type of job I swore I’d never do. I could recognize though that it would have been silly of me to not at least try, so I applied. And after running up against ninety-some other applicants, I was offered the position.
I carried on to work full-time for the college over the next seven years, in a few different capacities (I was even President of the union group I belonged to by the end of my tenure). But in March of 2020, everything changed. COVID-19 shut the world down. Time stopped and simultaneously sped up. I worked from home for fifteen months.
Six months prior to the pandemic, I’d had my second child – with my brilliant English husband whom I met on a pen-pals website and dated long-distance for four years before he moved to the US and we got married (a story for another day!). He works in early childhood education and was called back much earlier than many others. Those were some of the most difficult, but at the same time some of the best months of my life. I was lonely. I was overwhelmed. I was overworked. I was in the Student Employment Services office at this time and was processing payroll for student employees. It was very, very far from fulfilling. Without the interactions with staff and students on campus, my work was quite meaningless to me.
But what working from home did provide was invaluable. Time with both of my kids that I never would have otherwise had (even if they did drive me to the edge some days!). Time in my backyard, soaking up all the sun I possibly could while bird watching or reading.
Time to try new hobbies, like printmaking. You know, that thing you did once in high school where you essentially made your own stamp? I can’t remember what spurred me into doing it, but sometime in 2020 I purchased a starter kit and carved a simple branch, leaf buds on all the twigs growing from it, enclosed by a rectangular frame. I was hooked after that first block, but because I’m the kind of person who gets a new hobby every few months (hello, fellow neurodivergents), I knew I should wait it out and let the interest fade…
Except, it never faded.
So I kept carving and printing and carving and printing. After receiving positive feedback from friends and family, I started making and selling greeting cards. Towards the end of that year, I was still happily carving and I decided to open my very own Etsy shop and start a business account on Instagram. I named my business blockprinTED. My initials are TED, and I was pretty proud of my little play on words (acronyms?) there.
We rang in the new year and entered 2021. I was still carving and printing. I was also still processing payroll remotely and feeling completely drained by that. Almost halfway through the year, we put our house up for sale. We sold it. Paid off some debt. My husband stepped into a new role at work that came with a pay raise. At the same time, the college was beginning to call people back to campus. I started going to work two to three days in-person each week. After all that time working from home, I found that going back to the office was even more excruciating than before.
That’s when I realized… If I was going to quit my job, hopefully to never work in another office again, that was the time to do it. In August of that year, I sent in my resignation. What an utterly freeing and exhilarating and terrifying risk to take. The plan was to work at a local specialty coffee shop part-time, and sell my hand-printed goods part-time.
Maybe that doesn’t seem like a very big risk to some, but to me it was huge. My family was going to lose the healthcare I was eligible for through the college, and my healthcare was good. I would no longer be adding to my years of public service, and I was seven and a half years into the ten it takes to get vested into a pension plan. My pay would be unpredictable, and in the case of the café, nearly ten dollars an hour less. The security that my position at the college had provided would be no longer.
But I still did it. Throughout the months that followed, I learned to pour latte art and printed on everything from gift tags to t-shirts. For the first time in my life, I could genuinely say I loved my jobs. Both of them. My heart was so full it felt like it would burst. It was far from easy, but I was happy.
It’s been more than a year and a half now, and I still haven’t returned to office work. A few months ago, however, I did leave the coffee shop. It wasn’t because I didn’t love it anymore (because I absolutely did), but it was becoming too stressful to juggle the odd working hours with a family at home. I am now the Director of Operations for an incredible woman-owned brokerage. One of the nice things about this position is that I’m able to work from a new location everyday if I want to. Coffee shops, libraries, the comfort of my home. Plus, I’m still able to run my printmaking business.
Have I had to work hard? Yes. Has it been stress-free? No. Not even close. At times it’s been very difficult. Have I questioned my choices? Yes. But would I do it all again? Absolutely. The biggest lesson I’ve learned through this is to trust my gut. It always seems to know what’s right.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
My name is Tess, I’m 34, living in Michigan, and am a self-taught printmaker. I fell into printmaking somewhere in between my maternity leave in 2019 and COVID in 2020. That whole time is very fuzzy to me, and I don’t really know when certain things happened. I’ve done a lot of work with textiles in the past – tote bags, t-shirts, tea towels, etcetera. But this year I’ve chosen to focus solely on art prints. I’d like to learn more about different printmaking techniques and hone in on what I already know in order to improve my practice. I don’t like to commit to one specific style, but my work usually revolves around traveling, social justice issues, and nature.
Have you ever had to pivot?
At the end of 2022 I found myself feeling very overwhelmed and burnt-out by my jobs. Yes, I loved working at the coffee shop and yes, I loved printmaking, but it was just all too much. I had gotten too eager and over-committed myself. All year I had been applying for every artist market I came across, and I’d started printing on far too many different types of products. On top of all that, I had a family at home that needed me as well. I recognized that I needed to take a step back. So for this year, or at least for the first half of this year, I’m taking it back to basics with printmaking. I’ll be focusing on art prints only, and am not signing up for any markets. The weight that’s been lifted from the obligations I created for myself has really helped me gain some of my energy and enthusiasm back.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on NFTs. (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice)
I literally cannot wrap my head around NFTs. I just don’t understand them. It doesn’t matter how many times someone explains them to me. What’s the purpose? Is there a purpose??? I can feel myself aging more everyday…
Contact Info:
- Website: www.blockprinted616.com
- Instagram: @blockprin_ted
Image Credits
Tess Dodd