Carmen Maria Machado
carmen.machado@gmail.com

I'm 22. I graduated from college in December, with a shiny B.A. and lots of student loans. I job hunted for months. I wrote so many cover letters that even now, the valediction "sincerely" still makes my heart break. I've been sending these meticulously written cover letters and perfectly sculpted resumes into the digital void for over eight months now. In the interim, I moved across the country. Despite a handful of interviews, dozens of cover letters, and hundreds of resumes, I remain, in essence, jobless.

Everyone's been tremendously reassuring. It only feels like you've been looking forever, they say. It's not your fault - the economy's bad. Keep plugging away at it. Something's bound to pop up.

It occurred to me, late last night, that every resume that I send out is incomplete. After all, I've done so much in my short life, and I only have a page to shape those experiences to make it look as though everything I have ever done with my existence has been leading up to the exact position that I'm applying for.

So here's my resume. My actual resume. The one that I want to send out every time.

COVER LETTER

To Whom It May Concern;

(I promise, this Concerns You.)

When I was in college, I was in a basic film class. Every time a project came around, every class member was required to propose an idea. Class members were to vote on the idea that they wanted to work on the most, and the top three ideas were used. I loved this process. I loved it because I was able to stand up and talk about a story I wanted to tell, and watch as the camera techs and and writers and artists and storytellers and other creative minds gravitated towards me.

I was always picked. Always. For ideas that I scrawled down in my notebook on the train to school that morning, or something that formed in my head minutes before I had to present, or something that came to me as I sat in the bathtub the previous night, observing my prune textured hands in the yellow glow of my bathroom's single light bulb.

"You," one of my classmates later said to me, over something frozen and alcoholic, "are a woman of ideas."

I've always been this way.

When I was a child, I told stories. Out loud. I bounced my Barbies and dinosaurs and Fisher Price men over the purple carpet in an elaborate soap opera; engaging them in stories of war and thwarted love and romances across species. As I got older, the players became the people around me. The tiniest quirks exhibited by complete strangers assured them a place in my story. I'd sit at outdoor cafes and give stories to people passing by. That old woman in the corner? She paints songbirds onto rocking chairs in her small, sun drenched living room. The man on the bicycle? He's recovering from a ferocious breakup. He alleviates his pain by dragging his former lover's antique violin bow across his pale arm, straining his ears to hear the music.

Even stories that others told me - to them merely ordinary and nostalgic - transformed into vignettes of unspeakable beauty. My mother once told me how my father carried my siblings and I back from a fair when we were children. I was perched on his shoulders, my rambunctious brother clung to his neck, and my small, stubborn sister rode in his arms. All of this over hills and broken sidewalks, through the shaded avenues of our Pennsylvania suburb.

That was a story.

When I was eleven, and sitting in a nursing home, I watched my mother wash the feet of an ancient woman who didn't remember her name. The feet were twisted like roots, and she washed them with exceptional tenderness.

Even then, I know there was a story there.

In college, on a train to Virginia, I watched a woman in the seat next to me pick at a run in her stockings, a single tear poised at the tip of her nose, refusing to fall. Her free hand was wrapped around an orange, and she held onto it like it was the last orange in existence. Her fingernails had broken the surface of the peel.

I could have written the story there, our feet only inches apart, her sorrow so palpable that even after I got up at my stop and walked away, I could feel its tendrils still clinging to my skin, and smell the citrus in my clothes. Even now, I don't touch oranges without thinking of her.

Honestly, Truthfully, Kindly, Lovingly,
Carmen M. Machado

EMPLOYMENT HISTORY

I've worked with adults, with kids, with infants, with the disabled, the elderly, the disenfranchised. I've worked with irate and difficult people desperately seeking appeasement, with people who didn't speak English, with unhappy coworkers who only want to discuss their divorce. A women who patronized the hotel once called me her "superhero." I've been hugged by a lot of customers. Once, a man on the street said I had kind hands. Children love me.

I've worked at ritzy hotels, serving clients worth millions of dollars while wearing a suit and tie and pants that always looked dry cleaned in the unbearable summer humidity.

I've also been a janitor. Those floors had never been cleaner.

I write. I've done freelance writing about the intricacies of Washington, DC. I've typed up press releases and feature articles. I've written poetry about halves of pomegranates, and residing in the hearts of whales. I've done PSAs. I've written a screenplay. I've written short stories, one of which was a finalist for a literary prize provided by my university. Once, while bored, I wrote a seven-part quest for the RPG Oblivion.

I take photographs. I once photographed a crystal by nestling it into an avocado, in lieu of the normal, smooth pit. I've covered my roommates' Easter egg dying with the fervent attention of a photojournalist. I've shot weddings, parties, and nightclubs. I took pictures at my aging great uncle's birthday party, and they are both funny and sad. I love my cameras. I treat them as though they're another set of eyes.

I edit. When I was younger, I swore to a teacher that I could hear the misplaced commas. In college, I told a professor that "their," "there," and "they're" sound radically different to me. On road trips, I used to correct punctuation on passing billboards until my mother begged me to stop.

I paint. I draw. I sculpt. I make pottery. I create creatures out of cracks in the wall.

I've been a camp counselor in the Pennsylvania mountains. I've helped build a house in West Virginia. I've worked with youth in South Africa. I've written curriculum for Cherokee children in Oklahoma.

I organized and taught a creative writing class for the kids I worked with in South Africa. On the first day they wrote about trees and flowers. The next day, I made them write about dirt. By the end of the week, their poetry seized me by the arms and shook me.

I was a photographer at a children's photography studio, where I placated parents and coaxed children and soothed fussy infants. I was a cashier at a Goodwill, where I learned how to stand on my feet for hours at a time. I worked at a sex toy store and sold vibrators to nervous women who looked like my mother. I learned to listen to other people, to be compassionate, to help them help themselves. I worked as a canvasser for a political cause, and was chased down the street by a man with a rake. I learned how to speak up, how to work for something that I believed in, and how to run without dropping my clipboard. I did administrative work for two different photographers, serving as an organizational system for their scattered endeavors. I fetched coffee and film with equal zest. Once, when a model didn't show, I volunteered to have my own face smothered in toothpaste and photographed. I answered phones at my university library with diligence. I worked at a pottery studio and taught people how to recognize their own creativity. I loaded and unloaded hot kilns in the quiet still of the morning.

Once, I locked myself out of my house, and I climbed on the roof to get back inside.

SKILLS

I'm the daughter of an engineer who taught me that there was always a solution. "You can always make it work," he said. "It may not always be pretty, but it will always work." I take this to heart every time I'm faced with something. "It's a problem solving activity," I say, chewing contemplatively on my thumb before doing something radical like tying a sofa to the roof of my bitty car with nothing but twine and pantyhose. My father has a family motto: "Machados never give up."

I can write, creatively and technically and for media publications and the internet and blogs. I can take pictures, using a 35mm camera, a digital SLR, any type of medium or large format camera, as well as digital video cameras. I can edit and proofread. I'm personable and excellent with customers and the general public. I'm hardworking. I can type faster than many professional administrative assistants. I can multi task. I'm so organized that I have a calendar on my computer and a calendar that I carry around in my purse and a giant sheet of butcher paper on my bedroom wall where I keep my "to dos." I have extensive knowledge of blogging and internet networking sites. I can act. I've been in six Shakespearean plays, and stage fought in three of them. I can use Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office, FileMaker Pro, and website design programs. I know HTML.

I've taken classes in Fine Art Photography, Commercial and Large Format Photography, Photojournalism, Writing for Mass Communications, Reporting, Film & Video, Writing for Visual Media, Advanced Writing for Film, not to mention four fiction writing workshops, one poetry writing workshop, and a creative nonfiction memoir writing independent study that changed the way I look at writing altogether.

I didn't just "move" to California. I threw all of my possessions in the back of my tiny car and took off, knowing that what I sought lay past the campy South Dakota billboards and misty West Virgina hills and soaring Colorado mountains. When I saw the Rockies for the first time, I forgot to breathe. When faced with the Grand Canyon, I was unable to stand. I just sat in the dirt with my suntanned arms wrapped around my legs, letting the tears fall. The road was strange and beautiful. Wyoming was so wide. Illinois was so cheerful. Minnesota was so sad. I drove and drove and never took my eyes off the horizon. I was nervous. I was uncertain. But I'm still here.

Maybe that's my greatest skill.

I'm not afraid.

I'm looking for a job.

Maybe you've got one for me.