Hinterland Quick-fire Interview: Jay Prosser
Q&A with the contributors from our latest issue.
Jay Prosser teaches and researches Jewish studies, gender studies, and creative nonfiction at the University of Leeds. His short memoirs, which to date have explored his mixed-race heritage, have appeared in december magazine and the Tablet among other places. His first book, Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality, was published by Columbia University Press in 1998. His most recent book, Loving Strangers: A Camphorwood Chest, a Legacy, a Son Returns, is published by Black Spring Press in 2024.
What’s the last thing (except for this!) that you wrote?
Notes from a grant application meeting.
What’s a recent discovery that you can’t keep quiet about?
Rachel Cockerell’s Melting Point. It’s family and cultural memoir that, extraordinarily, has no narrative or reflective voice. It explodes everything we’ve thought so far about memoir.
Words to live by?
You don’t have to finish the work, but neither are you free to leave it. (Pirkei Arvot, Sayings of the Fathers).
Tell us something about yourself that surprises people...
I was expelled from school.
What’s your piece in this issue about?
While I have been writing memoir for about 10 years, I have not written anything previously in the genre about my transsexual transition. So ‘Clips’, which is about this subject, is a new venture for me.
I wrote the piece with a sense of urgency. It is thirty-five years on from my transition (from female to male). I feel a need and a responsibility to write personally about transsexuality now in order to counter the transphobia in politics, culture, and real lives. The hate and misunderstanding towards trans people is much worse than when I was young and beginning my transition. Also, I’m conscious that I’m soon to lose my much-loved parents, who struggled with, and then welcomed my transition.
‘Clips’ captures my transsexual life in relation to their changing attitudes – and also in relation to their ageing.
Thanks Jay! You can read ‘Clips’ in Hinterland Issue 15.
Issue 15 is available to preorder over at our webstore now, and will be heading out to magazine subscribers and preorder customers in the next couple of days.