{"id":334,"date":"2020-10-26T18:28:46","date_gmt":"2020-10-26T22:28:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/welter\/?p=334"},"modified":"2021-06-17T17:49:20","modified_gmt":"2021-06-17T21:49:20","slug":"qa-with-memoirist-krys-malcolm-belc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/welter\/2020\/10\/26\/qa-with-memoirist-krys-malcolm-belc\/","title":{"rendered":"Q&A with Memoirist Krys Malcolm Belc"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Memoirist Krys Malcolm Belc<\/p><\/div>\n

Krys Malcolm Belc is the author of In Transit<\/strong>\u00a0 and upcoming memoir The Natural Mother of the Child<\/strong>. Here, Joshua Cole speaks with\u00a0Belc\u00a0about finding space for writing during the pandemic, his writing process, and how being trans has informed his work.<\/em><\/p>\n

Over the course of\u00a0<\/strong>COVID, have you found it more difficult to write?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve never been a daily writer. That\u2019s not my process. I\u2019m 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\u2019t 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\u00a0it. Unfortunately, after three or four weeks, everything shut down. Writing at a coffee shop was no longer an option.<\/p>\n

How did your book In Transit<\/em> come to be?<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019s when I was first exposed to the concept of flash essay. Quickly, I learned that not only is this a<\/em> thing, it is my<\/em> thing. This is what I\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n

Tell me a little about your new book, Natural Mother of the Child,<\/em> which is coming out in June 2021.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Natural Mother of the Child<\/em> isn\u2019t 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\u2019s 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\u2019t think about them as a book for a while.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2019t have a beginning, middle, and end.<\/p>\n

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

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\u2019t know what to do with\u2014for example, how to refer to the speaker at different times in his\/her\/their life, what names to use, etc. \u201cMy old name is in this piece, but let\u2019s not say that name, because I don\u2019t use it anymore. I\u2019m (insert chosen name) now.\u201d<\/p>\n

In my writing, I\u2019m not only the author of the piece, I\u2019m also the speaker. The person in the memoir is not the speaker\u2014that person is not here in 2020 writing this essay. The memoirist is a present-day person. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Lots of cis people find trans people confusing. It\u2019s important for cis people to recognize that not everything is written for them, and it\u2019s 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\u2019s who the writing is for.<\/p>\n

You can find out more about Krys and his upcoming work at https:\/\/www.krysmalcolmbelc.com\/<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Krys Malcolm Belc is the author of In Transit\u00a0 and upcoming memoir The Natural Mother of the Child. Here, Joshua Cole speaks with\u00a0Belc\u00a0about finding space for writing during the pandemic, Continue Reading →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4381,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[5,7,8,6],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/welter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/welter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/welter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/welter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4381"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/welter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=334"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/welter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":375,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/welter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334\/revisions\/375"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/welter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/welter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/welter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}