Pushcart-nominated essayist in National Geographic, Guernica, Creative Nonfiction, and dozens of print and digital magazines.
As seen in/on CBS This Morning · CNBC · The Cut · Fast Company · Levo · NPR Marketplace · MarketWatch · Money · More · MSN · The Progressive · USA Today
Also a Seattle-based engineer and some other things.
I am not Melissa Meske, Melissa Mesko, Melissa Meschke, Melissa Meszaros, Melissa Mesulam, Melissa Makala, nor any of the other Melissas with uncommon M surnames who are also writers and creative entrepreneurs. (But if you are one of those Melissas, wanna start a convention in Melissa, Texas? People named Kyle shouldn't have all the fun.)
select writing
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)
A Tour of the World’s Most Enchanting Libraries
Travel with me 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.
Complaining About 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
Jade Sharma, Her Irreverence, Her Audacity
Remembering the author of Problems
LitHub2020
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.
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; “community” in scare quotes.
Translating Douglas Hofstadter’s strange loops of translation
➰➰➰2019
Coding a way to switch pronouns in a text; exact translations that don’t exactly translate; natively genderless pronouns in Finnish; feeling like a bigot when I trip over ze/zir; is there room for the singular pronoun, “I,” to be made plural?
🏆 Monograph appears in The Strange Loops of Translation (Bloomsbury, 2022)
My family’s attempt to escape the deadliest fire in California history
Guernica 2019
The 2018 Camp Fire in Northern California; escaping the town of Paradise, CA that burned to the ground; how to drive through flames and black smoke.
🏆 Acquired by McGraw Hill for the essay composition textbook Power of Process
Around the U.S. National Parks in 5 Books
A literary tour through our remaining wild lands
National Geographic 2018
Taking in the Everglades, Saguaro, Canyonlands, Arches, Yosemite, and Mesa Verde National Parks.
🏆 Included in Great America
Fucking with oblivion
Math 2018
Creative nonfiction. Putting aside Marcuse and Habermas in pursuit of sex; Gauloises Bleues; obsession; the station at Bajcsy-Zsilinszky in Budapest.
When the lecture ended, in his frumpy sweater and ill-fitting slacks, he edged his way out of the auditorium. There was a fundamental awkwardness to his gestures, an angularity. It almost seemed like doubt—as though he weren't entirely sure whether his arms, his legs, were to be trusted.
Neither were mine. I had to force myself to wait until he had left the building. Then I let myself get up. Out on the street, my eyes were starved. I took off past the Szechenyi Bridge toward Váci Utca.
As I meandered I got progressively more disoriented; labyrinthine streets unfurled and little landmarks vanished when I turned around. I thought about my desire to lose myself in the streets and how little it carried over into the rest of my life. This crush disturbed me. I was glad the sky was turning to night—the way I felt made more sense in the dark.
Read at Math
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
As it turns out, the amounts in grants I was, well, granted, would indeed have been higher were it not for the scholarships. As a low-income student, I qualified for the full amount of available state and federal grants. But I received less grant money than I qualified for because of the scholarships. The way they calculate it, the scholarships lowered my need, so I qualified for less grant money. The scholarships I had worked so hard for ended up canceling out my need-based grants dollar for dollar.
So where would my scholarship money be going? Apparently to some combination of the federal government and the school itself. There would be no payout—not to me at least. Huh?
I ditched class to spend the next day in the waiting room at the financial aid office. It was like any classroom, students nodding off in antique chairs, except when they woke up they were confronted with a bail-bonds-waiting-room level of anxiety.
Read at The Billfold
It’s possible to not have a country. But is it possible to not have a language?
Mask Magazine2015
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.
I handed her a pencil and asked again with my sweetest teacher voice. She limply held the center of the pencil in her fist and made no indication that she knew what I was saying. I was annoyed—how do I announce her to the class if I don’t even know her name? But a bigger thought shut me up. What if something’s really wrong—what if she can’t talk at all?
I’d heard some crazy stories since I’d started teaching. Some of the worst were from our Lost Boys, the umbrella term for the 20,000 Sudanese boys who traveled thousands of miles escaping soldiers, lions, and starvation until they chanced upon U.N. camps in Kenya and Ethiopia. The Lost Boys are said to be the most severely war-traumatized children in history, and I had a number of them in my class. Though I’d never met one, there had to be “lost girls,” too. Might she be one?
Read at Mask Magazine
On Chrissie Hynde and the first Pretenders album
The Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Albums of All Time2017
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.
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.
Getting Off On Entrepreneurship Porn
And getting off of entrepreneurship porn
New Worker2014
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.
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 favorite spots in the Southwest, like the one-horse village of Mexican Hat on the Utah border just up from Monument Valley.
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 blogger, Winter 2018
Finding faith, losing it and—well, losing it
Hobart2019
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.
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.
The Queer Business of Naming and Being Named
On Words Without Borders
New South2018
An examination of three works that stretch the bounds of language to capture vastly different notions of personhood and identity.
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
What it Means to Compete as an Artist
Seeing clearly when your business is personal
Big Cartel2017
The special hell of being a personal brand and doing battle with other people’s personal brands; how to focus on your own shit, avoid the drama, and maybe even win.
🏆 Commissioned for Big Cartel’s artists in business series
Toward a methodology
New Worker2016
Serendipity is by nature accidental, but that hasn’t stopped business from trying to capture it. I throw in my own account of how optimizing for seredipity led me to more than chance delights, but a full-fledged career.
Protesting at the second inauguration of George W. Bush
Mask Magazine2016
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.
An object lesson in the art of becoming
The Hairpin2017
How to segregate by race when you’re mixed race; punks, cholas, and other options in the all-you-can-eat teenage rebellion buffet; hood-era Gwen Stefani; girl gangs; when a girl takes off her hoop earrings, you know it’s on.
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 Daily2018
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 someone else’s life.” Easy for me because I’ve kept a record of every day of my life for over twenty years! Take that!
🏆 Anthologized in What Happened on June 21st (New Michigan Press, 2018)
🏆 Guest on the Essay Daily Podcast
On this day in 1998, A fragment of a quote from Kafka—something about how he’d rather have a page of good writing than a day of beauty. I remember thinking: man, I love you, but you are as wrong as the day is long—and it’s the solstice...
On this day in 2003, I studied Hungarian while my roommate was out, went to a meeting about the housing co-op we were starting, and then packed up to go to Sacramento for a direct action and a march. I remember hiding my language studies because it felt immoral, shameful, to spend time learning esoteric things while a war was on. I consoled myself knowing that one day, after I made myself effective in fighting the system, I’d have plenty of time in prison to fritter away studying agglutinative languages...
On this day in 2009, I was living in my car again, somewhere in New Mexico...
There is one reason to document your days: to honor your life. It’s a bottle thrown to sea. Should it come back, it will sound familiar but distant, like an echo or a shell pressed to the ear.
Read the anthology from Essay Daily
select criticism
Gulf Coast 2018
Platypus Press UK 2018
Queen Mob’s Tea House 2018
Will the Last Bad Bitch Leaving Seattle Turn Out the Lights
The Wilds 2018
Maša Dakić as Elfriede Jelinek
Platypus Press UK 2018
Polyester Magazine2017
Borges, Bruno Schulz, and Biography
Platypus Press UK 2018
The Problem with Being a People Pleaser
The Ascent 2016
Platypus Press UK 2018
The Wilds 2018
select experimental and memoir
Fanzine 2018
Code Lit 2024
Unlost Journal 2017
Vagabond City 2019
RIC Journal 2019
Gravel 2015
Souvenir 2016
Longridge Review 2015
Flapperhouse 2018
The Common 2019
L’Éphémère Review 2018
The Collapsar 2016
select tech culture
How Much Does a $100K Website Cost?
Hacker Noon 2017
Websafe 2K16 2016
Is it Žižek? No, it’s Crowdfunding
New Worker 2014
The Wilds 2018
Forget Dating Apps: Single People Turn to Coworking
New Worker 2015
Monogamy: Not Suitable For Work
Pyragraph 2015
You Don’t Have To Join a Coworking Space
Freelancer’s Union 2014
(many) other things
Software engineer leading teams at a major publishing company.
Published hundreds of writers as the editor of New Worker and ➰➰➰ and others.
Former public high school teacher with certification from Cambridge and the state of Texas.
Lived/worked in 5 countries and 7 U.S. states, traveled extensively in 35 countries.
Self-taught creative developer. I no longer do client work but here are 50 websites and apps I built long ago for a range of artists and major brands.
UC Berkeley magna cum laude, degree in rhetoric and in natural resource conservation.
Co-founded 2 nonprofits, 2 companies, many publications, a housing cooperative, and some other stuff. I keep finding things I wish existed and then try to make them exist.
Career mentor for people who don’t believe in careers.
Currently at work on a novel for people who don’t believe in novels.
alright already
If you ended up here because of something I wrote, welcome. My writing is a shameless elaborate ploy to make friends with interesting strangers.
If you’re considering reaching out, just do it. 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.
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If you’re not already familiar with me, here’s the most interesting podcast conversation I’ve had (on Vandal’s Curious World podcast), the most inspiring book I’ve been in (Courtney Martin’s The New Better Off: Reinventing The American Dream), and my most bad-ass print magazine interview (Michelle Obama’s feature about first-generation college graduates, in More).
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email: email[at]melissamesku.com