Melissa Mesku
Many people probably looked at UC Berkeley graduate Melissa Mesku like she was crazy when
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.
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.
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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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 (2019)
🏆 Selected for audio syndication by Curio
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)
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.
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 Power of Process essay composition textbook
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
An experimental publication somewhat preoccupied by recursion
2019–present
The leading independent publication in the U.S. about work, anti-work, and the future of work
2013–2020
Pure Cure « cofounder
Co-op Roots « cofounder
Design Strategist « cofounder
The Inc « advisory board
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💻 Self-taught creative developer. Software engineer. Career mentor. I no longer do client work but here's an old portfolio of 50+ 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.
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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*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
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