Why Art Predator Should Get A Really Goode Job

Why am I going for a “Goode” job? Why do I think I’ve got what it takes to convey the Murphy-Goode Wine Country Lifestyle to a broad audience using social media? This is what I wrote on the application form when I uploaded my video and which I posted on my page “Getting a Really Goode Job” along with a resume.

Poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge defines the aesthetic as that which engages the whole soul. In life, I seek and find “that which engages the soul.” Then I write and speak about these aesthetic experiences for print, television, radio, and now through social media outlets such as WordPress blogs, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.

My eclectic subjects range from literary, visual, musical, and dramatic arts to culinary arts like food and wine, from encouraging my readers to be engaged with their worlds by attending festivals like Burning Man and Coachella to environmental activism such as participating in group bike rides like the First Friday ArtRides I organize or joining a Grow Food Party Crew.

I moved to the Bay Area from Southern California as a poet, dancer, and performer at the Renaissance Faire. My enthusiasm for coffee led me as a 20 community college student to train with Mr. Peet of Peet’s Coffee and to work for him at the Menlo Park store.  My ability to convey that enthusiasm plus my love of wine (developed by visiting the tasting rooms of Napa and Sonoma) led to an invitation from the owners of Ridge to work for them in their tasting room.

I loved working at Ridge—I loved the wine, I loved the people, I loved being up there on the Ridge, driving the windy road and through the vineyards, setting out the wines on the picnic table, talking about wine with other enthusiasts. I loved the sense of family and community between the owners, winemaker Paul Draper, and all the people who worked together to put the wine on that picnic table for me to pour.  I also loved taking unfinished bottles home, tasting them as the week and the wine progressed.

I worked at Ridge for a year or so, helping in the tasting room and at special events, leaving to hike the 1700 mile length of California on the Pacific Crest Trail, and then on to UC Santa Cruz for a double major in Environmental Studies and Literature/Creative Writing; I completed the Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada and wrote a novel based on the experience. Before I left Ridge, I bought as much wine as my budget could allow, storing it in my grandfather’s wine cellar back home in Ventura, California. The last bottle of that wine collection was a 1980 Montebello Cabernet Sauvignon that we opened on New Year’s Eve 2001 at the Ahwanhee Hotel in Yosemite Valley National Park.

Yes, special wine makes an occasion even more memorable.

As a grad student in education, I loved teaching my undergraduate writing and environmental studies classes so much that I realized my calling was to teach adults; my masters is in English from the University of Nevada Reno.  Immediately following grad school, I moved to Art City Stone Sculpture Studios in Ventura, where I taught yoga, created and showed paintings and multimedia art, wrote poetry, and helped clients like artists and the City of Ventura to write grants and press releases.  I also had a newspaper column “Art Predator” where I covered food, wine, art, and anything else that caught my fancy and I was a regular guest on a local radio program.

In addition to working in college and university classrooms full and part-time, I wrote marketing materials and hosted promotional events for a program I developed using multi-year grants I helped write.  These materials included creating a website, a promotional video, brochures, newsletters and many other tools.

After many years of teaching college and working in academia, I started a blog in November 2007 to see if I wanted to use it as a teaching strategy. I found I LOVE BLOGGING, I am fascinated by social media, and I love learning about using these new tools for marketing!

Some of the events where I have, in essence, “live blogged” include:
August 2008 WordPress WordCamp SF CA
October 2008 Wine Bloggers Conference, Santa Rosa CA
January 2009 MacWorld,  SF CA (press pass)
January 2009 California Cultural Tourism Symposium (press pass)
Mar/April 2009 Yosemite Nat’l Park region
June 2009 WordPress WordCamp , SF CA
June 2009 Ojai Music Festival, Ojai CA (press pass)

One thing has led to another and, to make a long story short, I am on a new career path: using social media as a writer, content provider, and social media specialist for the wine industry—as the new Wine Country Lifestyle Correspondent for Murphy-Goode!

! Here’s the link to watch my video and where you can vote to

Put a poet to work in a vineyard!

http://www.areallygoodejob.com/video-view.aspx?vid=MEPRrfj1uHU

(Note: this link was taken down after the contest. The video lives on my you tube channel: