dear parents, guardians, and educators,
welcome, and thank you for your interest in august primeval. As you've likely read on my home page, I create
natural-history-based science fantasy stories and art
for queer and highly sensitive youth and young adults. My work seeks to address trauma while grounding itself
in life, wonder, and expansiveness so readers feel safe, loved, and powerful.
Like fairy tales of old, august primeval stories tell how vulnerable creatures and people can survive and defeat the horrors and injustices of the world. At the same time, my storyworlds focus on the beauty and quiet moments that await and strengthen them.
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As a queer author with autism, I've grown to recognize the need for stories where similar characters inhabit narratives that focus on their strengths, and worlds where the prejudices we face in this one lose their hold. Though characters face challenges, these in no way present their differences as problems to overcome. As I write with highly sensitive folk in mind, august primeval focuses largely on who characters are in quiet moments and relationships- celebrating rich inner life, simple joys, and release that comes with solitude.
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The themes of august primeval stories run counter to popular narratives that define freedom and growth by a person or group's degree of conformity to social norms- norms which include heterosexism, hypermasculinity, and ridicule and demonization of mental health needs and neurodivergence. In august primeval storyworlds, archetypes usually presented as heroes in mainstream media often serve as antagonist to more sensitive, vulnerable characters who resist, survive, and build lives in spite of them.
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As you explore the august primeval website, notice the majority of characters are animals of different geologic eras and evolutionary histories. This is no accident. As queer, highly sensitive folk of many abilities, our diversity in sensory, emotional, and cognitive experience not only reflects but is one with the very story of life on Earth.
august primeval is a living, breathing, growing literary sanctuary, full of wild creatures to defend it and roam new territories. I invite the children in your life and the child in your heart to make a home within it.
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Best,
august tian (august primeval)