What’s the landscape you were made to forget?
How old were you when you were taught to fear your body, to hem in your dreams to something more “realistic,” to sort your desires into categories of “good” and “bad” and hide all the bad ones away in the basement of your mind?
My writing and workshops center the importance of self-exploration, self-knowledge, and self-rediscovery as pathways to forging stronger connections with loved ones and living in ways that are true to ourselves.
Much of my work focuses on sex re-education, with classes and writings that break down the walls we’ve been taught to put up between our erotic selves and the rest of our lives. Who we are sensually, sexually, and erotically, is not a separate person from the other parts of us. Our desires are influenced by our identities and experiences, and when we live in a violent, white supremacist society the impacts of racism, ableism, classism, ageism, fatphobia queerphobia, and whorephobia creep into our internal worlds like strangling vines. Digging out all this toxic garbage from our internal landscapes requires deliberate effort and access to knowledge in order to understand what’s crept into your gardens and how to replant and cultivate the desires you actually want to thrive there.
Who am I, anyway?
An ever-changing creature. But for the moment, I use the name A. Grand Mark (Pronouns They/Them/Their). I’m a white, queer, disabled artist, writer, educator and nerd living down in Texas. An introverted little weirdo, I spent a lot of time building my own rich internal worlds, breathing life into characters who got to go out and befriend dragons and werewolves while I was stuck learning fractions.
As I grew up, I started committing these stories to the screen and realizing that while dragons might not be an option, the loving connections and roving possibilities I dreamed of very well could be, despite the messaging I received growing up in a deeply conservative, queerphobic state. These continuous discoveries of my own desires and dreams prompt much of my nonfiction work, as my first impulse upon realizing something for myself is to go “does everyone know this?? Everyone should know this!”
Comics have been a passion since I was a kid, and discovery of queer indie comics and zines in early adulthood hooked me on being able to have my own conversations with readers panel by panel for the last 12 years.
My paintings are about capturing moments, in crowds, in nature, in quiet spaces, flooding the page with the softness of transparent watercolors, or the bright juicy colors of acrylic and gouache.