Weaving together the threads of writing and gender

Keith Maillard grew up knowing nothing about his father. On his father’s death, Maillard was given his scrapbooks, and set out to capture everything he remembered or knew about him, writing a first memoir, Fatherless, published in 2019. Maillard had generated a lot of text, not all about the senior Maillard.

“About each piece of writing I had to ask myself, ‘Is this about my father, is it absolutely focused on my father?’ If it was,” he explains, “then it went into the Fatherless file, and if it wasn’t, it went into the file I called The Second Book.”

The Second Book became Vancouver-based Maillard’s new memoir, The Bridge: Writing Across the Binary. He recounts with impressive honesty not only his writing journey, but also his journey toward understanding his gender dysphoria.

“It would take me over 60 years to arrive at a clear understanding of my problem – I was trapped inside what we now would call ‘the gender binary,’ the notion that there are only two choices,” he says.

The two threads of The Bridge – writing and gender – begin in his home town of Wheeling, West Virginia. The 1940s and 1950s are beautifully evoked, with both the freedom and the rigidity of the times.

“That era we call ‘the ’50s’ was more complex and nuanced than it is often portrayed, but the gender split was just as bad as anyone remembers, and down at the kid level it was bad indeed,” says Maillard. “Everything under the sun was labelled ‘for boys’ or ‘for girls’ and then dealt out into two neat, mutually exclusive blue and pink piles.”

Maillard didn’t clearly identify as either a boy or a girl, which left him baffled. As a child he had panic attacks and night terrors, but he also knew he was loved. His cousin Billy was his closest friend, and Maillard’s mother and grandmother were supportive. “The sense I always got from my grandmother,” says Maillard, “is that I was just fine however I was.”

In the ’60s Maillard was in Boston, writing for underground newspapers, and in 1970, burnt out and disillusioned with his country, he came to Canada. In the years since, Maillard has been a creative writing teacher, journalist, poet, musician, essayist, and novelist: his first novel, Two Strand River, published in 1976, featured two genderfluid characters and became a cult classic.

By 2006, 11 of his 14 novels had been nominated for or winners of literary awards. His most recent novel was Twin Studies, published in 2018.

But he had to come to terms with being non-binary. Growing up, Maillard had no role models.

“So years later when I was writing Two Strand River,” he says, “I was fully aware that I was writing the kind of book I would have liked to read when I was a kid.”

And will there be more acceptance of non-binary genders? “There’s a massive anti-trans campaign at the moment. It’s been quite successful in the United Kingdom; below the border it’s very much a part of the Trumpian worldview, and it’s certainly alive and well in Canada,” says Maillard.

“There’s a lot of work for us still to do.”