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Melissa Mesku

A quote: Many people probably looked at UC Berkeley graduate Melissa Mesku like she was crazy when...

Pushcart-nominated essayist with work in National Geographic, Guernica, Creative Nonfiction, and dozens of print and digital magazines.

writer


Around the U.S. National Parks in 5 Books

Travel with me on a literary tour through our remaining wild lands

National Geographic 2018

Taking in the Everglades, Saguaro, Canyonlands, Arches, Yosemite, and Mesa Verde National Parks with novels that capture some of their essence.

🏆 Included in Great America


The Solo Woman’s Guide to the Ultimate   Southwest Road Trip

Itineraries for 5-, 8-, and 13-day solo trips

On She Goes (Wieden+Kennedy) 2017

A road trip hitting my top spots in the Southwest, like the one-horse village of Mexican Hat on the Utah border just up from Monument Valley.


Tour the World’s Most Enchanting Libraries

From monasteries to royal reading rooms

National Geographic 2017

A researched photo essay on 23 of my favorite libraries around the world, photographed by Massimo Listri.

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essays
ESC

Restoring the Ship of Theseus

Is a paradox still the same after all its parts have been replaced?

Lapham’s Quarterly 2019

A philosophical investigation tracing Plutarch to Hobbes and Locke; Ai Weiwei dropping a Han Dynasty urn forever; copycat art vandalism; Maggie Nelson borrowing Roland Barthes’ Argo (which he got wrong); kintsugi pottery repair; Katamari Damacy.

🏆 Cited in Shipwreck Hauntography (Amsterdam University Press, 2021)

🏆 Cited in Compos(t)ing New Material Education

🏆 Selected for audio syndication by Curio


Multitudes

Translating strange loops in Douglas Hofstadter’s strange loops of translation

➰➰➰ 2019

Exact translations that don’t exactly translate; natively genderless pronouns in Finnish; feeling like a bigot when I trip over ze/zir; coding a way to switch pronouns in a digital text; how to scaffold unweildy complexity; is there room for the singular pronoun, “I,” to be made plural?

🏆 Monograph appears in The Strange Loops of Translation (Bloomsbury, 2022)


Latinx Heritage Month

Who do you complain to when it’s HR you have a problem with?

Creative Nonfiction 2021

The doublespeak in corporate diversity initiatives; on being the ethnicity of the month; having to highlight your difference but make that difference undifferentiated.

🏆 Nominated for the Pushcart Prize


To Live and Die in Dimes Square

Trading claims of belonging in a community that doesn’t exist

Hudson Journal 2019

Having a beer on stolen land; the Lower East Side of Manhattan; people who have eaten land but are still starving; “community” in scare quotes.


Escaping Paradise

My family’s attempt to escape the deadliest fire in California history

Guernica 2019

Escaping the town of Paradise, CA that burned to the ground in the 2018 Camp Fire; how to drive through flames and black smoke.

🏆 Anthologized in McGraw Hill’s 2024 Power of Process essay composition textbook

Show More

Oblivious, with Brown Hair

Fucking with oblivion

Math 2018

Putting aside Marcuse and Habermas in pursuit of sex; Gauloises Bleues; obsession; the station at Bajcsy-Zsilinszky in Budapest.


The Financial Aid Loophole That Cost Me   Thousands

I was on merit scholarships and need-based grants—then the scholarships cancelled out the grants

The Billfold 2017

The absurd ins and outs of Federal financial aid reporting that often negate merit scholarships for the poorest students.

🏆 Cited in support of a bill that passed legislation


Jade Sharma, Her Irreverence, Her Audacity

Remembering the author of Problems

LitHub 2020

Author Jade Sharma had the audacity to die at the age of 39, in July 2019. When I found out Jade had “fucking died,” as her editor Ruth Curry put it, I compulsively went back through our texts and emails. I was plagued with a question. It wasn’t how; I was pretty sure how. It wasn’t why exactly, either. Then I picked up Problems and read it again.

“What, really, are we doing—what the fuck is this life, what is it for, where is it going? What really matters, and what do we do? I only trust people who are addled by this question, even when I fucking hate their answer.”

The Silent Refugee

It’s possible to not have a country. But is it possible to not have a language?

Mask Magazine 2015

Creative nonfiction, a story from my days as a high school teacher. A student of unknown origin becomes a tabula rasa until she can speak for herself.

“This girl might live in a completely unintelligible reality. I tried to imagine an inchoate mind grasping but having nothing to hold on to.”

R*d Sc*re

The podcast that shall not be named

➰➰➰ 2019

The politics of nuance in a polarized agora; self-censorship; weighing a “socially responsible” left Straussian impulse against true social responsibility; online mobs and hills one might die on.

“Nuance gets lumped into pre-existing binary categories. Everything is either good or evil, left or right, woke or bigoted.”
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Getting Off On Entrepreneurship Porn

And getting off of entrepreneurship porn

New Worker 2014

How business journalism glorified entrepreneurs to absurdity; sex metaphor LOLs; oh elusive success!—so much easier to just stare at a glossy magazine spread and imagine I already have it.

“There is only one subject, the big swinging dick. Everyone else is an object. No thought is given to how the thing gets made. Certainly no thought is given to who gets fucked.”

Clarice Lispector and Experiments with White   Heat

Stalking inspiration with pen and paper

Gulf Coast 2018

Água Viva by Clarice Lispector; flash floods of euphoria turn to waterlogged prose; paper is a feeble catchment device.

🏆 Gulf Coast’s guest blog, Winter 2018


The Pastor and Marguerite

Finding faith, losing it and—well, losing it

Hobart 2019

Creative nonfiction, Southern California noir. In the shadow of a mercurial friend; Sassy magazine, Jared Leto, sneaking out; hardcore and pop punk; questionably Christian virginity.

“In her steel toe boots, she stomped and lunged into the guys, trying to start a mosh pit. Every time Marguerite jumped, I darted in the space she opened up.”

Bright Houses

Casas Brillantes

Carve 2018

Creative nonfiction, Southern California noir. The vague unease of suburban tract housing; hanging out with white people in Mexico; lacking history vs. feeling ahistorical.


That’s a Good Idea

Precarity and the profit motive

Institute of Network Cultures2017

Frederick Taylor’s scientific management techniques from the early 20th c.; now that everyone’s their own boss, it’s just us exploiting ourselves; a drinking game for the entrepreneur-proletariat.

🏆 Included in The Pervasive Labor Union (2017) by Silvio Lorusso

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Chola Makeup

An object lesson in the art of becoming

The Hairpin 2017

How to segregate by race when you’re mixed race; punks, cholas, and other options in the all-you-can-eat teenage rebellion buffet; fake chola Gwen Stefani; girl gangs; when a girl takes off her hoop earrings, you know it’s on.

“If I wanted to be fierce and intimidating, wouldn’t a bare-faced female who doesn’t give a shit about makeup or identity be the fiercest of all?”

What it Means to Compete as an Artist

Seeing clearly when your business is personal

Big Cartel 2017

The hell that is your personal brand doing battle with other people’s personal brands, and how to focus on your own shit and avoid the drama.

🏆 Commissioned for Big Cartel’s artists in business series


#155: The Pretenders

On Chrissie Hynde and the first Pretenders album

The Rolling Stone 500 2017

A tour through the classic album, and the rollicking story of how Chrissie Hynde came to be; on almost joining Devo, then The Damned, then The Clash; trying to marry Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious for papers; turns out Chrissie is a hell of a writer.

“Hynde’s attitude arrives fully formed; in three separate tracks on this record she’s telling someone to shut up.”

The Queer Business of Naming and Being Named

On Words Without Borders’ annual issue

New South 2018

An examination of three works that stretch the bounds of language to capture vastly different notions of personhood and identity.

“The war has left its mark on the soldiers, and the narrator’s own name—changing from Jibran to Miran, to Uftan—may itself be read as an effect, not just of the broader war, but of his private one.”

Quantifying Serendipity

Toward a methodology

New Worker 2016

Serendipity is by nature accidental, but that hasn’t stopped people from trying to chase it and business from trying to capitalize on it. I throw in my own account of how optimizing for seredipity led me to more than chance delights, but a full-fledged career.

“Serendipity is when you accidentally stumble upon something great, particularly when you weren’t looking. It’s a lot like luck: for it to be serendipitous, it’s got to be a good thing and it’s got to be unplanned.”

No Turning Back

Protesting at the second inauguration of George W. Bush

Mask Magazine 2016

The intimacy of staring your political adversaries in the face; collective memory is the mob of the mind; the logic of the arena; how battle lines get drawn.

“Even if she and I have the emotional depth to make a nuanced assessment of each other, it will not happen here. The environment is too charged, the hostilities too high.”

Twenty Years of June Twenty-Firsts

In which Essay Daily asked “What Happened on June 21st” and I provided 20 years of personal answers

Essay Daily 2018

Geoff Dyer, after reading through one of his old journals, wrote, “How funny to end up being one’s own biographer, to have to resort to the kind of research required by writing about someone else’s life”—easy for me because I’ve kept a record of every day of my life for over twenty years—bam!

🏆 Anthologized in What Happened on June 21st (New Michigan Press, 2018)

🏆 Guest on the Essay Daily Podcast


Fuck it, show all

20 Years of Handwritten Notebooks

Substack

For over twenty years I wrote for myself, by hand, every single day. I post pages from my teenage notebooks on Substack so as to chaotically undermine my good reputation (possibly as a person, definitely as a literary writer).

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editor


Founding editor

An experimental publication somewhat preoccupied by recursion

2019–present

➰➰➰

Contributors

What The Actual Fuck

What We Talk About When We Talk About Recursion


Founding editor

The leading independent publication in the U.S. about work, anti-work, and the future of work

2013–2020

New Worker

About

Contributors

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other

Pure Cure « cofounder


Co-op Roots « cofounder


Design Strategist « cofounder


The Inc « advisory board





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also

💻 Self-taught creative developer. Software engineer. Career mentor. I no longer do client work but here's an old portfolio of 50 or so websites and apps I built for a range of artists and major brands.

🌎 Lived/worked in 5 countries and 7 U.S. states, traveled extensively in 35 countries.

🎓 UC Berkeley magna cum laude, degree in rhetoric and in natural resource conservation. Former public high school teacher with teacher certification from Cambridge and the state of Texas.

🎯 Co-founder of 2 nonprofits, 2 companies, lots of publications, a housing cooperative, and some other stuff. I keep finding things I wish existed and then try to make them exist.

 Currently at work on a novel.

Also creating a handbook to help teenagers retire at 18, pursue their calling, and avoid working for a living in their 20s—I did it and it's replicable. I'm interviewing people so if this is/was you, definitely reach out 💋

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appearances

        I’ve appeared on CBS This Morning, CNBC, and in AM New York, Business Insider, The Cut, Fast Company, Levo, MarketWatch, Money, More, MSN, The Progressive, and USA Today. In my capacity as a writer, my most recent interview on air was on the Essay Daily podcast; in print, was in Carve; in person was at Ditmas Lit in Brooklyn.

In my role in coworking and the future of work, I’ve been interviewed by Coworking Europe, Deskmag, NY Tech, Shareable, Social Workplaces, and on a number of podcasts. My last interview about “work” was in Optix’s Future of Work series.

In my role as a random person hellbent on overcoming barriers, I was selected by Michelle Obama to appear in a feature she guest-edited (about first-generation college graduates) in print magazine More. I’ve talked in a bunch of places, Vandal’s Curious World probably being the most interesting to listen to, and Courtney Martin’s book The New Better Off: Reinventing The American Dream (2016) the most interesting to read.

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Goods* and Services**

*The goods are odd but the odds are good

**Actually there's no goods but my services are free and real. For free, for real.

I talk to all kinds of people for all kinds of reasons and I love it. I offer formal career mentorship and for everything else you can just book time with me here. I'm also collecting questions for an ~advice~column~ that's in the works. Let me put my galaxy brain to use – I love a good problem and a bad one and all the 99 kinds – let's figure some shit out

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Life advice

· Strategy /// You tell me what you want and I tell you how to get it

· Unstuckery /// You don't know wtf you want and I tell you how the f to find out

· Inscrutablesse /// You something something and I asdfgkjjajaaa;;;

or

Something else &whatever;

or

Fuck it, the pleasant aimlessness of friendship

contact


Mentorship

My "let's talk" calendar 💋

Ask an anonymous question

email: email[at]melissamesku.com

twitter

substack

clinkedin the social network for white collar criminals

schedule time with me

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