Southerly Breeze

Biographie de Faun Pischerke

I grew up multilingual from a very early age, received my Masters degree in Engineering Physics and spent my formative years in Bulgaria, under the shadow of a mild, yet persistent political persecution and harassment by the regime. My background cannot be understood without a few words about my country of origin - a little known European country with about 7000 years of history, home to the third European alphabet, whose people have brought the oldest known Sun calendar, dating back some 7000 years.
This is a country that has had its name intact for a little over 1300 years and has survived and outlived several major empires. This country has been a Christian nation for much longer than major European nations, and has given birth to great reformers of the church, at the time when Europe has ensconced in the "Dark Ages".'Mild' in this case means continual, sometimes overt, sometimes implicit denial of job and growth opportunities, based on political origin, as well as travel and residency restrictions.
I started writing back in the early seventies, while still in high school with several research papers on bionics, quantum mechanics and relativity theory that have won me national awards and later, Dean's scholarships. Half way through university I caught the proverbial 'writing bug' and decided to try my hand at free-lance journalism. Despite or better, because of the obvious and not-so-subtle difficulties of publishing in a country with tight government control on print media, I had managed to publish about 40 articles both in popular, weekly publications (some of them now defunct, due to the radical changes in Bulgaria at the end of the 80's), as well as in international magazines and symposia in Bulgarian, Russian and English languages.
Topics varied from reporting on the latest technological advances in Western science, to philosophical discussions on human cognitive development and Artificial Intelligence and book reviews. This research has also landed me participation at two, all expenses-paid symposia - in Los Angeles (CA), 1988 and in London (UK), 1989. I have worked as an adjunct professor, trilingual linguist and an IT specialist (including several stints as a technical writer) in various capacities.
Among other things worth mentioning, I have served nearly three years with the US military in the Middle East (Iraq and Afghanistan) as an IT & logistics specialist and have acquired absolutely superb experience as a result.