It, self introspection, even done in the boundaries of therapy, really is the only way to blossom any form of talent. I spend a lot of my time not simply teaching but designing ideas, curriculum, projects for students to develop them—-so I'm constantly looking at, measuring, contemplating the development process. What I am lucky to have done, though I wasn’t considering it as feeding into my interests/career path then, is being a teacher’s Asst. in undergraduate. What this meant was that I was developing (writing, reading, critical thinking) but I was also witnessing/absorbing teaching, higher levels of writing, reading, class and curriculum design and the measurement of whether students/myself were progressing.
Polite/Federman/Feldman
In their classes we would submit a 10 page project, 3x a semester, read it aloud and critique/be critiqued You provided the other 25 to 30 students a copy of your project—-that was in lieu of buying a book for the class. What i can tell you is that the challenge was doubled in that you were trying to come up with something original and you had to stand and read your work and then get about a half an hour of detailed feedback and questions. I did this for about 5 years, sometimes as many as three classes a semester where I also acted as essentially an administrative TA.
Irving Feldman was what I dubbed Hard Master from Asian ideologies of training. He was often brutal, dismissive, eviscerating of student’s work. he and I once closed out a class, arguing back and forth over one of my pieces about whether it was grounded in Black Rage or manhood rage. We were both right. I would sit at his right hand at a thirty foot long conference table and he would slowly go around the room and then almost as the final act, ask me to give my input.
By the time I’d advanced to his classes, I had a reputation, not only as the only undergraduate TA in the entirety of the SUNY system but also as being deeply invested in the work itself. Not just my own, but the other students. My attention to the work of others was my trying to de-code what worked, didn’t work, was unique, was problematic, was interesting, etc.—-to enhance my own abilities. There were many times when someone did something, created something that was beyond my thinking and i was duly impressed. So by the time Feldman got around to me I had gone through the 10 page piece half a dozen times, with a pen, marking up, asking questions, etc..
(He would later tell Carlene at a cocktail party at how impressed he was at my attention to the works of others and how good my work was. To my face he was pleasant, direct but not effusive with praise.)
In class he laid out very strict boundaries for poetry and then for prose. For prose one had to not write in any genre—no mysteries, no sci-fi, no guns, no vampires, none of that. You had to write a story with dialogue. because I’d taken his class before I was ready with years of training in how to write a story but I would say half the class, coming in to masturbate their ideas into their favorite genre were often deeply perplexed and gobsmacked at the challenge.
Federman’s classes were more—-raucous, fun but with a firm underpinning of thought and work. his specialty was experimental fiction so he encouraged folk to go out on a limb. He spent the first two weeks giving examples of experimental writing, lectures and discussions, some readings and then projects were due. Part of the challenge of the class was to create something outlandish, big, good and still maintain control of it. His biggest compliments were—-”There's Something Here, but it needs a lot more work”, “This is yet another Great American Failure”, “Yes, you’re onto something.”—-He recommended myself and another young man, who was ill, to publishers, the young man, a year before me, but there was a greater urgency to his work/time as he was working, supporting a family and ostensibly, dying.
Federman was in many ways the Chaos Master—-whose antics, and thick, impossibly French accent, experimental OUT THERE ways of seeing words, writing, the page itself, were so chaotic as to be almost impossible to understand, because the point was to create your own controlled chaos.
Carlene Hatcher Polite, who wore expensive, custom made haute couture with jewelry and necklaces and bangles and berets, made of the finest materials on Earth, purchased from all over the planet—-often teased classes, while dancing in front of the room, that she was the Monkey Master—-but she was in fact the Soft Master. She was the firmest, gentlest, complimentary, loving teacher who was also deeply, deeply grounded in knowledge, reading and sussing out bs. Her methodology was to announce that on the first day everyone would be getting an A. It could be either for Asshole or Awesome, it was up to you to interpret the A. She suggested some books, you could buy them or not, and she gave two, one page assignments for the entire semester.
Some thought her class an easy A. Her class was in truth an experience that would broaden you if you could patiently engage it. Some did, some didn’t. I became her first TA after John Ransom, gone then a decade, though many had applied. She felt, also teaching Black Literature and Prose Writing that unfortunately too many non-Black students knew Black history, literature better than Black students and were more qualified. Until I came along.
There were other professors—-Stacy Hubbard and Professor Fred See, who were instrumental in getting me to visit Princeton
(as a recommendation to Toni Morrison, who was also Carlene’s cousin) and then teach me how to think about teaching. Hubbard’s class on 19th century domesticity was a center point for me and when I first became aware that the professors talked about me behind the scenes.
In an effort to become a stronger student, having entered at 21, I took advice from another student who has a school program, Where There’s A Will There’s An A—-one of the tactics being to to purchase the books for college classes the semester before going into the class. Thereby creating long term planning and a deep familiarity with the work. I did so for several classes so when my name popped up on Hubbard’s class list plus my being known for TAing Federman and Polite’s classes, Hubbard told me she was excited. because of my pre-reading, a rather dense subject—-19th Century Domesticity—-I was a superstar at discussing in class, understanding what she meant, where she was going, the thrill of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie!)
I give the above as a sort of an insight into my first formal, competitive development as a writer—-Debbie Freeman, Dr. WH Hunter and Denise Donnelly, along with Ann Campbell at John Jay High School, my first formal mentors in writing/reading/filmmaking, and then Harold Williams in an extension program I did at Long Island University—-all before SUNY.
To illustrate the development process in myself, my mentors work (then Professor Stephen Brookfield and Professor Elana Sigall at Columbia) I look back and I have done so with current students, to how others did and did not develop fro SUNY.
Kevin-Kayelyn, Nick and Jennifer
Kevin and I met in middle school and then he went off to SUNY Buffalo. I followed, first visiting, and then having a spiritual epiphany there, two years later. My family thought because we were best friends I chose Buffalo over NY or Pennsylvania schools I'd applied to but it was the spiritual epiphany. By the time I got to Buffalo, Kevin had semi-transformed into Kayelyn, a transgender person. I say semi because insanely in single sex shared room rooms, Kevin-Kaye would live, but tell other people, that it was a administrative mix up. Kevin and I had created comic books, he wanting to be an illustrator in middle and high school.
Kaye and I did a dozen in-house sex and sexuality workshops, being written up in local magazines and newspapers—-but I opted out of doing more—-I had come to Buffalo to pursue learning, writing, an English degree (maybe), not to be a vanguard about sexuality, publicly. I started writing for the school magazine, the school newspaper, and several school chapbooks, periodicals—-all at the same time.
Nick was a student who had flunked out of Brooklyn College and the following year got in to UB. We met, the first time I remember, at a chapbook meeting, where he came across a crowded room to squeeze into a seat next to me. I noticed it/him as odd. He then went out of this way to become my friend and it became obvious to me and dozens of others, that though he had a girlfriend, he was gay and interested in me romantically. He eventually came out to me and admitted all kinds of same sex shenanigans. He was also an aspiring writer.
Jennifer Karmin was a student and one of the creators/editors of the chapbook I was an editor for, and then President, and submitting work to. She was also in many of the classes I was, writing, poetry her specialty, particularly in women’s studies. She took to Federman's experimental style and even embraced the critique process, once calling me years later, know my embracing of the classes as a student and TA—-yes, I still had my copy of her work in storage, so I was able to give her a copy.
Starting with Jennifer and perhaps a couple of others that I wasn’t as close to, know about, she’s achieved success, directly in writing, poetry, being published, teaching, etc.. What she and I were “known” for around SUNY, we maintained and became, in our careers as well. She dressed and giggled like a hippie—-almost three decades out of her “time” but her work, I remember as being searing, playful, thoughtful, polemic. Then, and in retrospect, I would have bet on her becoming what she has become today.
Kaye and Nick not so much.
What I learned from Kaye, transgenderism, transsexuality, was that there’s a healthy way to do it and a non-healthy way. Kaye did it the decidedly non-healthy way. She was at SUNY for 7+ years, maintaining a 1.0 GPA but shielded from expulsion due to presenting trans to the school. She didn’t do the psychiatric care, the psychological counseling, the correct medical counseling for hormones. Instead she did hair dye, padding, and eventually illegal hormones.
We insanely became roommates for a couple of years, her driving me into therapy and then permanently severing the relationship when her inviting vagrants into the house to “draw”, her illegal drug use, her eating disorders, depression, tantrums—-a whole mélange of comorbidities—-simply grew to be too much.
- Having grown up in a dysfunctional household, I made allowances for such people—-I take full responsibility for—-eventually a therapist pointing out that Kaye and others (Nick, my family) gave me something to do, a veil which to help, fix, attend to, so that I didn’t have to admit and manage my prodigiousness and surround myself with contemporaries.
- I chose broken people so I wouldn’t feel bad about being capable of so much more.
- I also chose them because as an only child I didn’t grow up lonely, but I was deeply enamored with having close friends, best friends—-not even paying close attention to how Kaye and Nick resented one another because the other co-opted my attention from them, their dysfunction, their wants from me.
I offer insight to that dynamic to Nick’s closeted, unwanted homosexuality and Kaye’s body dysmorphia from sexual abuse as a child by an adult, which she termed the “best sex of her life”, as indicative of the impediments to their art, to their development.
Jennifer and I talked about her sense of attachment and guilt to her blind father, who I met at an event, and being a woman, a White woman, trying to establish her own identity. Though we had a blistering confrontation in the meeting where I became President of the chapbook she started—-she was demeaning/condescending towards my nomination—-when I apologized to her afterwards and invited her—-and as my mother designed, to ferret out hard workers—-those, on the invitations, who had worked hard to make the magazine happen for years prior to me—-Jennifer and her boyfriend, showed up proudly smiling to my apartment for dinner. My mothers' point, she a psychology major from Baruch, was that only people who honestly knew they had worked hard would show up—-even Nick didn’t show up.
In many ways, Jennifer and I, in our prodigiousness and development and hardworking mindset were/are, the same and we were also in our early 20s, able to maturely express ourselves and heal an argument.
Nick wanted to be a writer but was constantly sort of impaling those around him for pity, at the father who’d died in a car accident, when he was a child. He kept a shroud of perpetual depression, sadness about him and passive aggressively manipulated those around him with it. Trying to be a hyper-heterosexual male when in fact he wasn’t and then trying to stand constantly next to me as a friend—-for some sort of seduction/feelings—-undid his talent. I watched from across the Feldman conference table as he excoriated Nick’s lackadaisical work.
(I felt only pity for him then—-Feldman had told me the horrible things Nick had told him about me before class, including that he needed all of his copied projects back as I might cast a voodoo spell on him with it. Yes, he obviously, as several professors pointed out—-he told a mutual Italian professor that he needed an incomplete because my mother had died, she hadn’t—-in fact, I took a semester off to work full time to pay for school. He had many mental issues, that one.)
But what I’ll offer of Kaye and Nick’s burgeoning talent was that their mental bullshit got in the way.
After college, Kaye eventually just leaving in year 8—-I pointed out to Kaye when she introduced a post-op trans friend who was a lawyer—-that the law degree was probably obtained pre-coming out as trans. Kaye asked how I knew and I pointed out that all of the trans folk I’d met through her had accomplished nothing beyond being transgender and basic survival (and I’d funded the apartment, making twice as much as Kaye by 25 and helping her get professional jobs.)
I offer these personal asides, insights into the idea of development to look at, as I have for myself and then into other students—-what works and doesn’t work, what derails potential talent.
It took Kaye 30 years to get an Associates Degree. What derailed Kaye was body dysmorphia, trans issues. Kaye never/still hasn’t pursued legal sexual reassignment surgery—-often lamenting a base confusion to progress.
Was Kevin a good artist? Was Kaye?
From Middle school through high school, Kevin was male appearing presenting and art was his refuge. Coming out at college seemed to have stuck Kaye, erased Kevin, yes, but fundamentally embedded Kaye as an identity who simply didn’t move in anyway. It was like becoming Kaye—-neither fully male nor female, was Kaye’s accomplishment. I didn’t see that then——we’d spent 10+ years going to school together, growing up, so I considered Kevin/Kaye like a sibling. And what I’ve learned as an only child with a faux sibling, is that you excuse their insanity.
In me, Kaye found a friend who simply accepted Kevin becoming Kaye. But in accepting Kaye, the closest to not caring about stepping on trans toes—-Kaye perfected using trans as both a shield and weapon against everyone from family to friends—-recruiting obese White women as coteries to make her appear more attractive. I once quipped to Kaye that eventually she would find a way to rid herself of me, our friendship, as she had done to others, particularly those who knew her as Kevin previously.
Ironically, I was the one to rid myself of Kaye (and Nick) but how did I get attached to them beyond friendship, love, desire for close friends/siblings?
My parents with their dysfunction drug and alcohol issues presented, invented the role for me to be the caretaker, the helper, the fixer, to broken people. And no one was more broken than Kaye and Nick—-amongst others I’ve met over the years. As a manipulative tactic at a restaurant, while trying to convince me to have sex with him, Nick insightfully mentioned that I would grow, blossom, when I rid myself of Kaye and my family. What he didn’t see in that moment was my being struck, not by his just being right—-but realizing he was as cancerous, as those he mentioned.
My Power
Growing up in that dysfunction chaos I learned to be a super helper, people pleaser, fixer, because it gave me passive aggressive control and manipulative power over sometimes my family but definitely Kaye and Nick. I got to dysfunction control people, make them dependent upon me through my love and acceptance of their rank insanity. Which translated into my feeling valuable, loved, attended to and it also served to allow me to push my burgeoning, outsized, talent aside—-so I was amazing-rocking 7, when I was really a True 12. But in my minimizing myself by surrounding myself with such self-destructive people, their dysfunction, it allowed me to be slightly bigger than them—-say they were 5s. So it served my ego in a dysfunctional way, as it also served me not advancing to my possibilities.
What shifted was siting across from Nick where I had once thought his masculinity comforting, a safe space, he seemed small, sniveling, talentless, gossipy, full of faggotry (years later as an LGBTSGL Youth Coordinator that was a term we used for outlandish sexuality related dysfunction). I remember thinking even his teeth looked yellowing, from smoking, spaced and rat-like.
Kaye as a roommate, once I recognized her projected insanity, and got into therapy to find out why I was mired in crazy, became passively attacking towards me/the apartment, willing to destroy it all—-with her divorced parents having homes she could go to—-all of my family thousands of miles away, down South—-her upending of the apartment potentially leaving me homeless.
I threw Kaye out and stood on my own two feet—I always had, I’d merely been holding/propping her up too and was fine afterwards in the apartment for quite some time (I’d been afraid of the rent alone though I made plenty. or more aptly, I was afraid of being alone, but within a year of ousting Kaye, with therapy, had worked that out, seen that as a false delusion of weakness. All that I had done for others was proof of my tenacity, brains, strength, etc..)
Nick I simply couldn’t fathom caring for anymore, he was so….pathetic. Almost avidly so. He allowed himself to be horribly abused (supposedly. he was a pathological liar so when me, his exes, friends, sat down, we had to piece together truth from his manipulations, years after.) by others.
When Carlene met Kaye at a university event, a few days later she asked my permission to tell me a truth—-and told me that she didn’t expect Kaye to be so fragile of a human being. And further that I would be friends with such a fragile person.
When she met Nick, she thought him small, weak.
Federman, when I introduced Nick to him, having known his ex-girlfriend, understood him as being gay, talentless. My mentors saw them clearly. Of course then my mentors were 40+ years older than us but after throwing Kaye out, I went on an apartment cleaning binge. Like scrubbing floors on my knees with Pine Sol. In my frenzy, Carlene gently, insightfully suggested that it wasn’t simply cleaning that I was cleansing my space from an unclean spirit—Kaye.
I wanted them both to be great artists—-with me. Though I saw the inherent, constant, profound limitations in their work.
True Development
To the idea of development—-I, having survived my dysfunctional abusive, family—-had significant amounts of therapy with family once they got sober, then LGBT youth groups with counselors to fortify my identity around sexuality, then groups, even at university, for years, around dealing with childhood sexual abuse, then after university, a year long therapist, when I saw Kaye’s deterioration and effect, towards me.
I also had at least 10 mentors by then focused on my writing and I was being regularly published in high school, college, and then even in college, referred to publications and publishers around the world, being published there too. Sometimes I look back and see—-in the face of Kaye and Nick’s stunted creativity. It must have been on some level, the vitriol they launched at me in covert and overt ways, resentment building in them, jealousy, envy. I often teach now how as an only child, I had no framework context for jealousy/envy until them because I was essentially unto myself. Is this what siblings teach everyone else?
Was Nick a good artist? Was he a writer?
No. And I was ashamed to be witness to Federman and Feldman telling him that. I was hurt for someone I cared for, being hurt.
But now I see, as a teacher, he didn’t put in not just the work that I and others (Jennifer Karmin for one) did, he also spent an inordinate amount of time hiding his true identity/sexuality, just as Kaye spent an inordinate amount of time building such a fragile one. Years later he sent a manuscript to a publisher/editor I incidentally know. I read it and understood why it was summarily rejected. He hadn’t put in the work—-Feldman's singular class, the writing one, he did in 6 years of undergraduate work—-I think I did like 30, and I know Jennifer did as many too. I often debate contacting her and asking her about her experiences with advancing, ability, etc., I suspect we had more in common than even I knew then because we were slightly separated by school-class, age, gender, and culture.
I felt guilty for being talented, celebrated, awarded. I felt a little shamed of myself. I downplayed myself. I segmented my life, into portions of Dysfunction Land I visited and played in, surveyed, judged and then I went back to my ever expanding Talent Land——where I even started getting paid for appearances-readings, short stories, etc. as far back as SUNY, never telling Kaye or Nick about the money, the recognition——and I slowly over the years stopped inviting them, minimized my accomplishments.
Over a Decade Later
Now over a decade later, I’m just all busting out with over a hundred books published, a TV show for 15 years, thousands of blogs and articles, hundreds of videos, work at corporations, charter schools, the NYDOE. and NYU. and Columbia University. I am rough, still got some stuff to work on, achievement of what my talent promised my mentors. Kaye and Nick, by internet searches and reporting friends in common, are not. I still wrestle with my prodigiousness even as I mostly don’t care what others think of me. It becomes sort of a totem to focus on not caring, and be so productively and demonstratively out—-you can Google my identity in many deeper ways than most people. Though I am recognized mostly here in NY because of the TV show, and workshops/teaching, I equate it closer to popularity than “fame”—-ironically, fame never being my goal as I do things that make me popular and will edge me towards popularity-notoriety-mayhap, fame.
I have had to slowly grow into my destiny, my prodigiousness, my abilities and artistic abilities—-accept them, flourish, embrace it, not sacrifice it for anything but air and water. I live by CANI in my art Constant And Never-ending Improvement. I am fascinated and live in anticipatory delight to see, in a decade, to look back on my creations, then again in 20 years, 30, 40, 50.
Yes, I sometimes feel sadness for the people whom I have had to leave behind, who I was using, harming in my attentions, as they would never fit, or satisfy me. Perhaps that’s why I try to patiently teach students, to make up for misusing my abilities, now to convey, to listen, to help, to fix in positive, directed, boundary based ways. I look back on my students I’ve mentored with a firm hand and so far, I’m marking myself a strong 80% success rate. I’ll get better.
Yes, my students, discussing development and success have helped me use the internet to I Spy into the lives of dozens of people—-friends, ex-lovers, family, etc. and we sit in a classroom dissecting them—-what they were, are, what didn’t become, what I remember. All of us learn, see my mistakes, the potential pitfalls, the areas where Kaye and Nick and others needed deep therapeutic help, still do. I forgive myself for settling for them, my work is my apology, my recompense to the world for wasting time in such a dysfunctionally self-indulgent series of friendships, relationships, even family engagements. Perhaps in another world, I wrote even more, more, more, more, spread myself further, faster without them. But then would I have as much grist for my creative mill?
When you know better, you do better.
#KylePhoenix
#TheKylePhoenixShow
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