Meet Melinda, Co-Founder & Editor at Final Gravity Zine
By Melinda Guerra
Hello! I’m Melinda, and I’m very excited for you to enjoy the content we’re pulling together for Final Gravity.
A bit about me: I’m a Mexican-American woman, the grandchild of immigrants who settled in Chicago to start their families. To start my own family, I left Chicago for “the more rural Midwest” several years ago, but still love the city that raised me. With some years since my departure, I’m finding myself less afraid of being murdered in a cornfield and more able to appreciate the “small enough that you can have a real favorite bottle shop, because you’ve been to them all” places we call home these days.
I make money by reminding people to breathe, breaking their seemingly overwhelming problems into smaller pieces, and creating the plans and paperwork to make those pieces manageable. I’ve done that for teenagers away from home for months, college students in foreign countries, business owners with the delayed realization that they need an actual business plan, and a range of clients with crisis communications needs.
Currently, I do that by day mostly at a law firm and by evening mostly at my own office: planning my clients’ special events, helping them shape their company identity, coaching them through TV appearances, and fixing their websites and resumés.
I live with two humans, a cat, and the house spiders we try to protect from said cat. I spend most of my free time reading books, essays, and really in-depth news pieces. I love stumbling across stories so compelling that everything else fades away for even just a few minutes, and then sharing those stories with everyone I know. Final Gravity is a chance to do that in a new (to me) format, with interesting people, and around subjects that connect to a beverage I really enjoy: beer.
When I first started drinking, beer felt inaccessible to me. Even after I discovered there was a world beyond the cases of mass-produced beers at family parties, I still had no idea how to begin to figure out what I liked. I found my way to pubs and breweries, and to a world not only of flavor, but also of heart: brewers working hard to tell a really good story, pour it in a glass, serve it to you with pride, and watch you enjoy every sip.
The stories we’re curating and presenting to you aren’t the kind we can pour in a glass, but we will serve them with pride and hope you enjoy every page. And we promise: they all pair well with beer.