VOICEOVER: As a professional journalist and interviewer, one question that I often hear is, “what do you do when the person you are interviewing is rude, or uncaring?” And up until very recently, I do not think the answer I’d give would be a proper one. Now, after taking time to reflect on my most recent interview with author, new parent and gender non-conforming individual Reese Marsh, I think that there are two types of botched interviews. There are the ones where the interviewee is unwilling to participate, the rock star or cynic or high-and-mighty creative who’s only there to please their manager. That’s the classic case, the one we’re taught to crack in undergrad. And then there’s the other side, where the interviewer messes up, makes a fool of themselves and hurts the company that they represent. Those are far less common, but you are about to listen to one, which I’ve made the difficult decision to air, almost unedited, with the interviewee’s permission. This is Jim Benniker, for PRR News Tonight, with Reese Marsh, author of eir upcoming memoir Gender Convict.

BENNIKER: Hello Reese, and welcome to PRR studios— can I call you Reese?

MARSH: Yes, that’s fine. I’m doing alright, Mr. Benniker, how are you?

BENNIKER: Jim.

MARSH: I’m sorry?

BENNIKER: Call me Jim.

MARSH: Oh, of course, sorry. How, are you, Jim?

BENNIKER: I’m quite alright myself, Reese. In fact, I’m very excited about the release of your new memoir, Gender Convict, coming out on May 6th. I’m curious how you feel about it, considering it’s your first nonfiction publication after a decade of being a novelist. Could you tell us about that?

MARSH: Sure. As you mentioned, before Gender Convict is my first published piece of nonfiction, but I don’t think I ever considered myself as a novelist or a fiction writer, because those terms can almost limit what my writing can be. After all, my novels do also contain a great deal of fact.

BENNIKER: But Gender Convict is a memoir, yes? Reading from the back cover here, A journey, at times a meandering stroll and at times a breakneck sprint, of Reese Marsh’s life from four to forty-four, and so on. The bookstores do need to know where to put you.

MARSH: For the sake of definition, Gender Convict is definitely much more of a genre piece than my other work. However, it also comes from a different place than my other work. I wrote my memoir more as a response, you see, to parenthood. There was a lot of stress, that I was facing, with writing at that time, and I tried to channel it into something meaningful.

BENNIKER: Yes, two of the hardest, most unforgiving jobs in the world: author and mother. I have with—

MARSH: Parent.

BENNIKER: I... yes. Yes, parent. Well, I h—

MARSH: Something I try to really delve into, in Gender Convict, is the intersectionality between parenthood and genderqueerness. People have this insistence that parenthood— “motherhood,” as you say— is the last unalienable truth in this world, that as a queer, non-binary person I cannot be responsible for a bouncing, bubbly cishet baby. If motherhood is a truth, then it is one I have tried to disregard on my and my child’s journey.

BENNIKER: Right. Thank you, for saying that, Reese.

MARSH: Of course.

BENNIKER: Well, I have with me an excerpt from Gender Convict, from the first chapter where you talk about growing up, quote, “a queer blade of grass in the midst of a raging Midwestern wildfire,” end quote. Particularly, I was interested in your friendship with your former best friend Rajah, and the affect she had on your life. Would you read this paragraph to us?

MARSH: I’d be happy to, just I ask you to refer to Rajah with they/them pronouns.

BENNIKER: I... yes. You are right. I... that is actually a mistake, on my, on my sheet here.

MARSH: Just keep it in mind. Thank you.

BENNIKER: I will... please, go ahead and read whenever you’re ready.

MARSH: If you’d like to do another take, I’d be happy to stay a few minutes longer.

BENNIKER: We’ll be fine. Thank you, really, for your consideration. Go ahead.

MARSH: Right. Well,

When Rajah and I were together, all of life’s little idiosyncrasies that made me want to tear my hair out just faded away. We played with dolls, we rolled around in the mud, we spent three hours once combing the ground in the woods behind their house for a specific type of pine cone to add to my diorama, just because it had a flatter base and could stand up straight. Even when we fought (mostly verbally but once physically, over who got to be the prince in our Cinderella production) we couldn’t stand to be apart for more than a few days. Alone, we weren’t tomboys or young women or anything that could be labelled. We were us, and that’s a feeling that can only truly exist in the waning twilight of childhood.

BENNIKER: Really, really powerful passage, thank you. I think I speak for us all when I say that I wish I had a friend like her. I wanted to ask you, Reese, about that last sentence, that hard-hitting conclusion. That’s a feeling that can only truly exist in the waning twilight of childhood. Would you say that it is was during this particularly intense period of friendship with Rajah that you realized you two were... different from other kids?

MARSH: I’m sorry?

BENNIKER: Your relationship, with Rajah. I thought that—

MARSH: You thought what? That the reason Rajah and I were so close was because we were ****ing in the woods? I was fourteen, you know, when they died.

BENNIKER: When they— wait, Reese. I—

MARSH: Don’t call me Reese.

BENNIKER: I’m sorry. I didn’t know. If I’d known they died I never would have assumed—

MARSH: So their only choice is to be sexualized or dead?

BENNIKER: I—

MARSH: Jim, I don’t think that you’re a bad person, nor that you mean any harm by your words, but I also don’t think that you read my book, or that you really understand what Gender Convict is. It’s a book that I wrote to put up with a heteronormative society while doing the most heteronormative thing someone with a female reproductive system can do. It is a book that I wrote half of in the hospital in between being gifted pink baby clothes and crying hysterically at how much my child looks like my childhood best friend. But most of all, it is a book I wrote with an unfathomable amount of love, because as long as I am a convict I will serve my term with pride. The least you can do is tell your intern to get past the dedication.

VOICEOVER: That was Jim Benniker, for PRR News Tonight, with Reese Marsh, whose upcoming memoir Gender Convict releases on May 6th.