By Mair Allen, 2021 Conference Assistant
We are thrilled that Krys Malcolm Belc will be leading our Memoir workshop at MCWC 2021! His upcoming memoir, The Natural Mother of the Child, which chronicles Belc’s experiences as a nonbinary transmasculine gestational parent, will be released by Counterpoint Press on June 15, 2021. Belc’s essays have been featured in Granta, The Rumpus, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere, and his work has been anthologized in Best of the Net 2018, Wigleaf Top 50, and in The Best of Brevity: Twenty Years of Groundbreaking Flash Nonfiction.
His workshop will explore how writers position themselves in their work, focusing on the construction of character in memoir. Spots are still available, so be sure to register for MCWC by June 30th. Belc talked to us about what was central to him in creating his memoir, his creative process, and the potential of fragmentation.
The Natural Mother of the Child is being released very soon! How are you feeling?
It’s a lot. As we joke in my house, the book is my formerly private thoughts available to anyone! But I also feel really lucky that my agent and editor saw the book, like really really saw it and saw me, and my work has been treated with a lot of dignity and care. We need more trans voices on everything and I feel grateful to be living in this moment when people were ready to let me join the conversation.
I’m interested in your citations of non-linear meaning-making in texts like Don’t Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine, The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson. The Natural Mother of the Child is shaped around your experience of nonbinary parenting. How do non-linear constructions of time connect to your work?
Every memoirist has to make decisions about how to work with time, and I do think that ultimately we all play with and even bend time in our work. If a writer sits down in their fifties to write about their experience of early childhood, they’re going to make just as many decisions about how to approach, compress, and stretch time as a more experimental memoirist might. The act of putting things in a logical order, in which we paint events in a narrative arc to appease our very human desire to consume them that way and to make meaning out of temporal order, that’s a formal choice as well, vs. a default way of storytelling.
All of this is to say that I don’t think non-linear forms are any more of a radical choice than any other form of storytelling. I consume and love all sorts of memoir and life writing. But when I read writers like Rankine and Nelson (and so many others) there’s a level of excitement in the work I have to do as a reader to follow the threads and to construct my own meaning out of their ideas, words, images, etc. I wanted to create that and for my readers to have that.
When I think about the “what happened” of my life—I had a pretty humdrum upbringing, got pregnant and had a baby in the context of a partnership, and trained and work as a K-12 teacher, the story there is not something that excited me. But circling around what that all means in the context of a trans childhood and the experience of trans parenting, that was more exciting. It lent itself to examining one idea—trans gestational parenthood—from multiple angles. I think of the book as having the question of what making another human means at the center, and each section is sort of like a new game I played to try to figure out what it means.
Your workshop focuses on character development in memoir, which is ultimately the development of the self as a speaker. What challenges have you had developing the speaker's voice in your writing?
So many! Because of the subject of this memoir I wanted to have the most intimate voice possible. That’s really hard. It’s tricky to want to write about an experience that is so personal and not talked about much and not to get explain-y, to put too much distance between me and the readers and lapse into being didactic. That was always my primary goal, not to turn this book into some queer family FAQ. Those are needed and great, they’re just not my project. I used a lot of strategies personally to work on my voice: writing about the same events from different points of view, writing in direct address, using visual elements, using formal experimentation to heighten the playfulness of my voice. A lot of the experiments stayed in. Writing in direct address has been the most meaningful for me in trying to nail down the voice I wanted: earnest, full of heat, able to express regret and confusion, etc. The last thing I will say about this is that reading work aloud helps. If I don’t really feel it when I read it, in my actual voice, it’s not done.
In your interview with SmokeLong Quarterly, you describe your memoir as a “trans-archive,” a compilation of essays, flash, photos, and legal documents. Can you speak to the process of this compilation and the editing process?
I think of putting essays into a memoir-in-essays like the decision to take family papers and photos out of a box and put them in a scrapbook: you’re composing an experience of memory. I didn’t want to tell the story of having a baby. I wanted to tell the story of my working out what having a baby means in my life. It was important for me to start with and trouble the image of the ultrasound; destabilizing the idea that humans in 2021 seem to take great comfort in that we can tell a lot about what parenting someone is going to be like by getting an ultrasound was almost like an opening act for questioning everything I thought I knew about what being a parent was going to mean for me before I did it.
On a practical level I abandoned Microsoft Word extremely early in the process. I taught myself the very (very) basics of Adobe InDesign and Photoshop so I could have total page control and there wasn’t some disastrous consequence to hitting enter incorrectly or swapping out one image for another. I read it over and over again in slightly different orders because I know that there’s a risk of a very fragmented work feeling slapped together. I am sure what I turned in to professionals was kind of a nightmare, but as a writing exercise if you have access to tools that allow you to really think about what a page as a unit is and can do, it’s fun to at least test it out!
Most writers have to balance several obligations, especially those marginalized by capitalist systems. I’m thinking about how creating something “fragmented” challenges dominant modes of storytelling through accessibility and by breaking the traditional narrative arc. I’m wondering what, if any, potential for disruption you see in short form?
I think there can be a bit of a false idea (not saying you’re saying this, just sort of responding to the world here) that writing fragmented work is what people engaged in care work do because of divided attention. Also sometimes this is talked about as a side effect of Our Contemporary World. And yes, I have divided attention because I engage in care work (as a parent and also working in a 9-5 that is a form of care work). For me at least I don’t write fragmented memoir because I only have time to dash off a few sentences at a time. Though that’s true! For me in my writing fragmentation on the page is more about creating a reading experience. My mind works in an associative way, where memories trigger other memories and then loop back to the original thought or image or scene. I’ve diagramed some of the sections of my memoir to try to understand how in revision I’m creating arcs-within-arcs. I think a lot about what is happening to readers, or what I hope might happen to them, since I don’t actually control their experience, if they’re in a scene and get pulled into the past or future. I really like the word disruption you’ve chosen. In a way my book is about how ambivalence and the push and pull I feel toward and against motherhood. Ambivalence for me is intrusive and often interrupts my ideas and memories as I weigh the other side of everything.
To learn more about Krys Malcolm Belc, visit his website at www.krysmalcolmbelc.com.
General registration closes June 30th! To register for the workshop of your choice, visit mcwc.org/2021-registration. There is no application required to attend MCWC and registration includes the morning workshop and all afternoon and evening events. All events will be held over Zoom this year.