How did you get started as a writer? When did you discover your passion?

I’ve loved reading books pretty much as long as I’ve been able to read. As a kid, I was always making up stories in my head, and sometimes acting them out with my siblings, but I didn’t really consider myself a writer. In high school, I wanted to be a musician, and my passion was definitely music. But in order to major in music in college, you needed to try out, and I was worried about what would happen if I didn’t pass the tryout on the first go. So I decided to declare a major in English. That way, if I failed the tryout for the music major, I’d still be able to go to college. But I never ended up trying out for the music major! I took a creative writing class that first year as an English major and it really opened up a whole new world for me. That’s when I really started to take myself seriously as a writer, and while I still love music, I’ve never really looked back.

What are the major challenges that you are facing in your career and daily life as a queer trans man writer?

Consistent access to healthcare is definitely the biggest issue for me. Not having health insurance makes it difficult for me to have safe and consistent access to testosterone, but trying to make a living as a writer (and even as a teacher) has inevitably included long stretches without access to healthcare. Not only is it a huge financial burden to pay for hormones out of my own pocket, but it’s incredibly stressful wondering how I’m going to afford them alongside my rent and student loan payments. But a full-time position doing something can make it hard for me to find the time and energy I need to write. So there are basically many different facets of my lifestyle that I’m constantly trying to balance in order to make it work as both a writer and a trans guy.

What about the writing process? Do you have any writing routines? What is it that kickstarts an idea/story?

My daily writing habit is really strict and really relaxed at the same time. Basically, I’m committed to writing one thing every day – but that one thing doesn’t necessarily have to be a poem if I’m not feeling inspired or just don’t have the time. But no matter what, as long as I’m writing something every day, that at least flexes my muscles and keeps them strong for when I am in the right mindset to write creatively or when I have a rare moment of free, unstructured time.

What are you working on and who are you hoping to reach?

Right now I am not working on a complete “project” per se – I’m still working on my personal poetics. I’m trying to develop a poetic voice that’s firmly rooted in queer and trans literary histories. While I, of course, have a lot of straight, cis writers that I admire and look up too, I think that a lot of contemporary literary conventions are still firmly based around a cis-het worldview. Anything queer seems to be too-often tokenized for political purposes or considered somehow “experimental” or (worse) “inaccessible.” So I’m trying to craft a poetics that can exist alongside contemporary literary conventions, but that’s clearly rooted in a different literary history, which I think is necessary to accurately reflect a different contemporary reality.

How do you view the writing in terms of cultural dialogue? What kinds of responsibilities do you think authors have, if any, outside of the art world? Do you feel your work would help other trans people or the movement for trans social justice more broadly?

I think that literature is critical to our spiritual well-being. Stories are a fundamental part of the human brain, and storytellers have been an integral part of early human communities around the globe for as long as there have been human communities. Poetry, in particular, uses language to simultaneously speak to our emotions and our intellect. Language is one of the most fundamental ways we have to both communicate and process the ways that we relate to the world (and the ways that the world relates to us). So a thriving poetics is critical toward ensuring that the ways in which we use language to relate to each other remain constantly fluid and constantly in witness to the full spectrum of human experience, whether those experiences be emotional, intellectual, physical, or socio-political. That being said, I think the
only “responsibility” that writers have is to the work. If the work speaks from an authentic space, then it’s work that’s important, regardless of how it challenges the society that’s receiving it. I hope that my work would help other trans and non-binary people in the sense that we just need more visibility in academic spaces. Queer literature gets too often relegated to the internet or informal publication spaces. While these are still valuable parts of the literary world, frustratingly few queer and trans voices are able to make it into print, and even fewer are recognized in elite literary spaces. With my MFA I’m already a rarity as far as trans people go, and I am very aware that my education gives me access to a literary level that’s still very closed to queer voices. I’m trying to use that access to break open those high-level literary spaces to make them more accessible to voices like mine.

Where would you like to see trans representation going when it comes to literature?

Just more, plain and simple. If you go into any bookstore, you’ll be hard-pressed to find books by LGB+ writers on most shelves, and you’ll be lucky to find books by trans writers anywhere in the store. So I’d just like to see more queer writers of all kinds not just getting their work in print, but getting their printed work out there on the shelves where they belong. I’d also like to see more trans representation coming from actual trans people. While it’s great that cis-writers are actively working to include trans characters and experiences into their work, it’s also a bit maddening that many of the books on the first page of the “trans” tag on Goodreads are written by cis-people. I’d like to see a literary situation where the most popular books about trans experiences are written by trans people, not the other way around.

You are coming from the US, you lived in China. How did you decide to go for a residency in Belgrade?

A bit of it was luck – this residency happened to be taking applications at the time that I was applying. But the Balkans are a region of the world that have featured pretty strongly in my imagination for a long time, and Serbia, of course, has been a huge player throughout the region’s history in terms of culture and politics. Modern and contemporary writers like Danilo Kis from Serbia and other parts of the Balkans had a huge impact on me when I first encountered them in grad school. The avant-garde writers of the 20s and 30s in Russia, Yugoslavia, and Eastern Europe really radicalized my approach to literature, and so it definitely wasn’t an accident that I started looking to this region as a place to focus on my writing.

How did you find Belgrade?

Amazing! And absolutely nothing like what I expected it to be. So much of my ideas about Belgrade and Serbia in general have been very darkly colored by political books and films, and so it was pleasantly surprising to find that Belgrade actually has a very bright and upbeat vibe. It also has a reputation for being a “party” city, which I guess is fair in the sense that people like to go out and have fun. But the clubs that I ended up were actually really fun and laid back – not the wild nightlife that I was picturing at all.

Your message to writers who wish to come and work in Belgrade…

Do it! The city has so much to offer creative people of all stripes, and the people of Belgrade are so social that, if you’re polite and curious, it’s easy to learn a lot about what life is like in this part of the world. It’s beautiful during the day or night, and it’s also very safe to walk and explore by yourself.

And finally, what are you reading now that might be inspiration for future work?

I’m actually reading Taschen’s Modern Architecture A-Z right now. Not a ton in there about Serbia or the Balkans, but seeing so many different architectural styles and historical places here in Belgrade has gotten me thinking very deeply about how our cultures and histories are coded in physical spaces. More deeply, I’ve been thinking about how those physical spaces relate to our physical beings in terms of the cultural lense through which we view our bodies. So… possibly an architecture-inspired poetry manuscript in the near future? We’ll see.