Millheim musician Serge Bielanko turns back to writing

A few weeks ago I saw an interesting post on Facebook, and since I’m on Facebook as little as possible due to a lack of interest, when I see something that catches my eye I bow to the Centre County god of synchronicity and I pay attention.

The post was written by Millheim’s Serge Bielanko, who has toured the world with his brother Dave and their Philly-bred bandmates as a bona fide underground rock star in Marah. He has steadily reinvented himself as a professional writer who enjoys the quiet serenity of living in rural Pennsylvania, loving and fathering his three kids, embracing his new role as a stepfather, and who most recently is turning his attention back to “Thunder Pie,” his personal blog that can found at www.sergebielanko.com.

“I got married last summer to my wife, Arle Bielanko,” Bielnanko wrote in an email, “who is from just over the Big Mountain in Reedsville, Mifflin County. She is really the one that has encouraged me to get back into writing, back into doing essays on my blog.”

Yes, he is a musician, but Bielanko is clearly a natural-born writer who has a knack for spilling his guts onto the page, or perhaps into the screen, with the intention of unwinding whatever it is that is calling to be unwound, and his previous although now somewhat dated entries are a testament to his approach. Getting back to that process is, in a sense, a way of getting back to something fundamental and life affirming.

“I write a lot of local coverage for Bellefonte.com and I like it,” Bielanko wrote, “especially covering history, but writing about my life and about how that all connects to life in general is way more powerful to me than I realized. It makes me feel alive again when I write on ‘Thunder Pie.’ ”

Isn’t that point of doing anything? Sure, we’re all scurrying around thinking about money and futures and things we’d like to have, all external things that we somehow believe will secure some kind of happiness. But Bielanko is talking about diving into his inner world, connecting it with the way it connects to his outer world, and how doing so makes – not helps – him feel alive.

“Writing is wildly cathartic for me,” he wrote. “I have dealt with depression a lot in my life and beyond all the other ways that I’ve tried to live with that and maybe get out ahead of it, it’s writing that helps me the most.

And it’s not just the process of writing. Bielanko is a phonemes junky, and – as he has often written about – is a Zen linguist, pairing the particulars of language with the particulars of experience as if in communion D.T. Suzuki, or possibly Frederick Franck.

“(I lose) myself in a cadence of words,” Bielanko wrote, “attempting to capture small moments of my very average day in hopes of seeing them in a more universal light is hard but rewarding work. I mostly fail at it, I’m sure. But when I do manage to nail it, it feels like I imagine a Powerball win must feel for that first hour or so.”

Although Bielanko’s method is to turn inward, it’s ability to be true, to be sincere, and to courageously articulate the darkness and the light that make his writing accessible.

“People that dig my stuff probably like it because I write a lot about raising kids and recognizing love and how much of a fool I really am when it comes to being a grown-up,” Bielanko wrote. “I’m a blue-collar guy. I have spent my adult life playing in an underground rock ‘n’ roll band, becoming a dad and a stepdad, experiencing heartbreak and loss and love, and barely getting by financially and mentally for long stretches.”

Bielanko still plays music with his brother, and Marah still has plans to record and release new songs, likely recorded right in Millheim at Dave’s new, state-of-the-art recording studio. In the meantime, Bielanko is a Centre County guy, once a Philly a transplant, but now a lovestruck Millheim denizen.

“I love Millheim. I love Centre County. I love the mountains and I love the cornfields and I love going to sleep at night with wild trout fighting clean currents not a hundred yards away from my pillow. I like living near wild turkeys and Civil War soldier’s graves. This place is home.”

This story was originally published March 1, 2020 at 5:00 AM.