Krys Malcolm Belc is the author of In Transit  and upcoming memoir The Natural Mother of the Child. Here, Joshua Cole speaks with Belc about finding space for writing during the pandemic, his writing process, and how being trans has informed his work.

Over the course of COVID, have you found it more difficult to write?

I’ve never been a daily writer. That’s not my process. I’m a slow-rolling kind of person. I have a lot of little things I tinker on. I also am not an at-home writer. Right before everything started to shut down in January or February, I made a decision to hire a babysitter solely for the purpose of having writing time. One day a week, I wouldn’t come home after work. I would just go write for a while. This was me saying that writing is important enough to pay for the time to do it. Unfortunately, after three or four weeks, everything shut down. Writing at a coffee shop was no longer an option.

How did your book In Transit come to be?

I came to the MFA program at Northern Michigan University as a fiction writer, where my professor encouraged me to try out other genres. I signed up for a creative nonfiction class. That’s when I was first exposed to the concept of flash essay. Quickly, I learned that not only is this a thing, it is my thing. This is what I’ve been looking for. The first flash essay I wrote is in the chapbook. I wrote half of the chapbook in that class. This book was about my angst of missing Philadelphia. The combination of terribly missing this place and finding a new form of expression at the exact same time was good alchemy.

Tell me a little about your new book, Natural Mother of the Child, which is coming out in June 2021.

Natural Mother of the Child isn’t a traditional memoir but more of a memoir in essays. It is an archival examination of documents from my life: my birth certificate, my children’s birth certificates, family photos, etc. The book investigates how giving birth to one of my three kids made me look back at my own childhood, consider what motherhood is, what it means to be a dad. I wrote the essays originally as standalone pieces. I didn’t think about them as a book for a while.

I considered traditional trans memoirs that examine how one discovers their gender identity, how people around them react, and the steps taken to achieve the life that they have now. There’s often a clear narrative arc. I love reading those books and would totally fanboy if I met the authors, but I feel strongly that there is no way for me to fit what I like to write into that framework. I don’t have a beginning, middle, and end.

Your book touches on a timely topic: gender. As a trans person, what is your stance on how pronouns and gender should be handled when speaking about somebody who is no longer the gender they were assigned at birth?

Trans people should be able to communicate the basics of how they wish to proceed with a piece that might be doing something that the readers don’t know what to do with—for example, how to refer to the speaker at different times in his/her/their life, what names to use, etc. “My old name is in this piece, but let’s not say that name, because I don’t use it anymore. I’m (insert chosen name) now.”

In my writing, I’m not only the author of the piece, I’m also the speaker. The person in the memoir is not the speaker—that person is not here in 2020 writing this essay. The memoirist is a present-day person. It’s important to recognize that trans people are going to have a huge diversity in what pronouns and names they use. A good rule of thumb is the writer exists in the present, so until told otherwise, use the name and pronouns they use now.

Lots of cis people find trans people confusing. It’s important for cis people to recognize that not everything is written for them, and it’s okay for them to feel confused. I love that people who are not trans read my writing sometimes, but having trans people read the writing, that’s who the writing is for.

You can find out more about Krys and his upcoming work at https://www.krysmalcolmbelc.com/.