About Mark

Mark Corbett Wilson was born in Hollywood, California. His parents had heeded the siren call of the silver screen and moved to HOLLYWOODLAND after World War II. Red and Lil were introduced by an older couple, Andy and Ev. Andy wore plaid shirts and jeans, managed their several properties, and always carried a Pekingese dog on her arm. Evelyn Pennac was a former big band musician who played in women only bands and was one of the first to integrate all-male popular bands in the 1930s. She owned a music store in Hollywood and gave Mark his first clarinet lessons, long before he learned about lesbians.

Mark's great-grandfather drove cattle for John B. Slaughter from Texas into the New Mexico Territory. After trying his hand at running the local store, he homesteaded 160 acres on the 'Frisco River. His daughter Ola (Mark's grandmother) married the Scotsman who owned the Reserve Mercantile in what would become, with statehood in 1912, Reserve, New Mexico. Mark's mother Lillian grew up working in the "Reserve Merc" until the family business was destroyed during the Great Depression, attended a year of business college while living with an aunt in a nearby town, and worked mostly in banks before starting a family. Lil then spent the next thirty years as the office manager for Pyro Engineering, a small company started by two engineers she met while working for Kaiser Steel Company.  According to one of her lifelong girlfriends at her eightieth birthday party (and annual family reunion) in Reserve, she was the prettiest girl in the county and they always knew she would be the one to move to Hollywood.

Little is known about Mark's father. He grew up in the industrial town of South Bend, Indiana, the home of the Studebaker Corporation, the South Bend Iron Works and Bendix Brakes, none of which exist today. Some say that Red got into trouble with the Chicago mob over collecting jukebox payoffs from bar owners, others point out he abandoned his wife and two children. Whatever the reason, Red moved to California, and then Hollywood, and started a new life. After various jobs, he became the Los Angeles office manager for Kennametal:  a metals and machining company supporting the oil, aerospace and automobile industries. After Mark was born, Red moved his new family to Whittier, a small Mid-Western Quaker and Republican town, twelve miles east of the LA river. He enjoyed playing flamenco guitar and being an avid rock hound and jeweler. Red died suddenly of a heart attack when Mark was a boy. Decades later, Red's favorite niece did the research necessary to join the Daughters of the American Revolution and would kid Mark that she dropped his middle name while having tea with the ladies.

After four decades of blowing glass, the last two making electro-optical devices in Surveillance Valley, Mark is now an Associate Liberal Artist & Sociologist and in 2023 became the third person to achieve the Canadian Certificate in Digital Humanities. This certifies 100 hours of both formal and informal digital humanities work, sixty in Canada, which he accrued over four summers in the Digital Humanities Summer Institute at the University of Victoria in Victoria, British Columbia, and online workshops from BCcampus, the provincial group working to transform B.C. public post-secondary education by facilitating innovative and inclusive teaching and learning experiences and to enhance collaboration, openness, and transparency. He has also attended the Digital Pedagogy Lab at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia, where he studied with EdTech's Cassandra, Audrey Watters.

Mark is a facilitator at StoryCenter.org, specializing in storymapping, GIS, and using Large Language Models ("AI") to augment digital storytelling. He also works as the Learning Experience Designer\Technologian at the Western Institute for Social Research in Berkeley, California, and occasionally writes about his lifetime of experiences in the third person.

Mark created a Notion portfolio as a project for a BCcampus micro-course. Notion blocks any attempt to embed a Notion page into a website. Now Mark posts at Talking with machines, his new Ghost site, and on federated social media like Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads he is @mcorbettwilson.