Join us for a reading and discussion of Krys Malcolm Belc’s THE NATURAL MOTHER OF THE CHILD moderated by Alex Marzano-Lesnevich.
Krys Malcolm Belc has thought a lot about the interplay between parenthood and gender. As a nonbinary, transmasculine parent, giving birth to his son Samson clarified his gender identity. And yet, when his partner Anna adopted Samson, the legal documents listed Belc as “the natural mother of the child.”
By considering how the experiences contained under the umbrella of "motherhood" don't fully align with Belc’s own experience, The Natural Mother of the Child journeys both toward and through common perceptions of what it means to have a body and howthat body can influence the perception of a family. With this visual memoir-in-essays, Belc has created a new kind of life record, one that engages directly with the documentation often thought to constitute a record of one’s life—childhood photos, birth certificates—and addresses his deep ambivalence about the “before” and “after” so prevalent in trans stories, which feels apart from his own experience. The Natural Mother of the Child is the story of a person moving past societal expectations to take control of his own narrative, with prose that delights in the intimate dailiness of family life and explores how much we can ever really know when we enter into parenting.
Krys Malcolm Belc’s work has appeared in Granta, Black Warrior Review, Tin House Online, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He lives in Kensington, Philadelphia with his partner and their three young children.
Alex Marzano-Lesnevich is the author of THE FACT OF A BODY: A Murder and a Memoir, which received a Lambda Literary Award and the Chautauqua Prize, as well as awards internationally. It has been translated into eleven languages and is in development with HBO. The recipient of fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, Yaddo, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and the Maine Arts Commission, Marzano-Lesnevich has written for The New York Times, Harper’s, Boston Globe, Oxford American, and many other publications. Their next book, BOTH AND NEITHER, is a combined work of memoir, history, cultural analysis, trans re-imaginings, and international road trip about life beyond the gender binary. Excerpted in THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 2020, it is forthcoming from Doubleday.