Checking In
The check for the essay I wrote about Craft Beer....
For the last year or two, I have made more of a concerted effort to be active about my media/writing work. Most of the opportunities that I have had are in my vocational area of working with high schoolers to discover and develop their giftings and goals. It is truly my day job and I am extremely grateful for it. I essentially get paid well to be helpful and informed about things that interest me. Career and Calling is the essential foundation.
A lot of dumb and unwise stuff that teens get themselves sucked into are because they have no vision about their life. With that lack of long-term gaze, all of the churn and chaos of the sometimes awful world of adolescence overtakes them. Social Media has been profoundly unproductive and unhealthy for high schoolers. I told a gaggle of girls embroiled in a conflict the other day that if I were king, I would feed all of their smartphones into a high-powered wood chipper and pulverize each of their phones into a million pieces. I was only half-joking. The technology is profoundly altering high school social norms and adults don't exactly model productive patterns.
The other type of work that I have been doing with media/writing are on things that of interest to me avocationally including writing as a craft, beer, and culture-making. My three published professional essays this summer were about these specific topics respectively. Coming back from the L.A. Festival of Books in April 2016 lit a fire underneath me to keep pushing the literary efforts. It is easy to get discouraged because of the nature of pitching ideas to others. There is a lot of non-responsiveness. Not even a strike-out but a deafening silence.
With the just received my $50 check for writing my essay about Craft Beer, I promptly recycled the cash into attending a truly first-class food and beer event up North a bit at a farmstead from the 1700's with friends yesterday evening. It was run by Fetish Brewing Company...an upstart nanobrewery here in Lancaster, Pa., who have a certain snark that is refreshing at times and obnoxious at other times.
The setting...
One of their beers....this is the fine Pumpkin Ale. Usually, Pumpkins are gourdishly gross. This was understated and delicious....
The food....seriously a notch above bar grub. If this had been up in West Chester County, NY, where Hill and Bill live, all those suckers would have paid $500 to attend an event of this quality. I have been to the Aspen Food and Wine Fest, the premier Foodie Event in the States. Tickets are $1500 for three days. So overhyped and underwhelming...
This Fetish event was 50 bucks. I love living in Central Pa.
I had pitched a story idea to Food and Wine who sponsor the Aspen Food and Wine Fest about the great Vietnamese Food here in Central Pa (because of the settlement of the Vietnamese after the War ending in 1973). To their credit, they got back to me. To their non-credit, they dismissed me pretty curtly by giving me a stupid reply to my question of who writes for them. The essential answer was effete snobs like them. A circular argument of writers who write for them, as if that relationship has existed eternally. Sorry, I guess my Ph.D. from a world-class university and Main Line lineage cred are not sufficient. The Scriptures warn the rich of the coming judgment...it is no laughing matter. James uses language like "weep and howl." Snobbery ain't cool, man.
It was magical night and I felt the seasons starting to change in the wind. It was warm but the breeze whispered about cooler days coming. I truly love the Fall. It has been a hard, harsh, and hot and humid summer here in Pa. It is time to take the temps down. The evergreens speak of the coming cold...
Here is a list of my media/writing work: it is in itself a growing forest of work...
Writing
Book – “On The
Edge: Transitioning Imaginatively to College” – Lulu Press – January 2013
Blog – Bierkergaard- Started writing in 2011.
350,000 pageviews
Dissertation – “Exploring
Parents’ and Their High School Students’ Understanding and Perspectives about
College Preparation Knowledge” - Doctoral Dissertation – Ph. D. in
Educational Psychology, Temple University – May 2010. Available on Proquest,
also
Essay – “More Than
Dust” – The Front Porch – Summer 2016 - http://www.therowhouse.org/
Essay – “Something
Brew(ing) Under the Sun” – Christ and Pop Culture – June 2016
Essay – “To Read and
Write in L.A.” – The
Curator – June 2016
Essay – “Athanasius
Again” – Modern Reformation – May 2009
Interviews/Speaking
Newspaper – “What
If You Could Go Back to College?” – Quoted for the article in the Wall Street Journal – August 18, 2011
Newspaper – “Coaching
Can Help Qualified Students Aim Higher” – Quoted for the article in USA Today – June 2010
Podcast – “On a
Transitional To A Collegial Life” –
The Lancast – September 2013
Podcast/Presentation – “The College Transition” – The
Rowhouse Forum – February 13, 2012
Presentation - “Fueling the Imaginations
of Public School Kids.” Trust Conversation:
Q Commons – Lancaster, PA. September 2015
Presentation – On
The Edge: Transitioning Imaginatively To College”, Eric Bierker Ph.D.
Pennsylvania School Counselor Association 59th Annual
Conference – December 2014
Radio – “School
Counselors Observations of Education and
College” – SmartTalk WITF Public Radio
– March 2015
Eric Bierker Ph.D is the author of "On The Edge: Transitioning Imaginatively to College." A book for the college-bound. Check it out!
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