[The Stage is on Fire] is a page-turner in which, much like life, there are no easy answers and yet each step of the journey yields insight and hope. This work of heart must not be missed!
Melanie Faith
Creative Writing Teacher, Essayist & Poet.
Katie Steedly’s first-person piece [The Unspeakable Gift] is a riveting retelling of her participation in a National Institutes of Health study that aided her quest to come to grips with her life of living with a rare genetic disorder. Her writing is superb.
The Society of Professional Journalists
In recognition of receiving the Dateline Award for the Washingtonian Magazine essay, The Unspeakable Gift.
I thank you … It is the authenticity of your “class notes”; and it is the delicacy and skill with which you present the nuances of classroom life and the actuality of your students’ and fellow teachers’ lives.
Maxine Greene
Philosopher and Education Scholar
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Weekly Wide-Awake: The Books Falling Club
What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.
J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
In April 2020, in the throes of early-pandemic isolation, I decided to start reading the books that have lived, unread, on my book shelf, through multiple cross-country moves, in and out of storage boxes, for years. I know I am not the only person who has piles of unread books scattered around their space. As the daughter of voracious readers, I had a collection of books long before I knew how to read on my own. They made sure of it. Reading together every night was a staple of growing up for me. Summer reading programs at the library. Top reading groups in elementary school. High scores on standardized tests of verbal skills every step of the way in school. In graduate school, when I was trying to discover where to focus my academic gaze, my doctoral advisor told me to look to the books I schlep around. Books have always been about comfort, connection, learning, and inspiration for me, so I decided to let the books fall this year – to choose me – and start a virtual conversation with the authors via my daily blog. I began to use my blog, as Salinger suggests, to treat my favorite authors as terrific friends that I could call up on the phone. Each book – each author – became part of the Books Falling Club. I consider each post an invitation for others to join the Books Falling Club. The Books Falling Club has helped me sort through all the grief and loneliness and inertia that could have stopped me in my tracks this year. No phone calls were placed, but wisdom was definitely shared.
After 8 months of daily blog posting, I decided to pull a few of the daily posts together into this week’s Weekly Wide-Awake – Weekly Wide-Awake: Books Falling Club Volume I. In this Volume, I reflect on Oliver Sacks’ Gratitude, Parker Palmer’s Let Your Life Speak, Cheryl Strayed’s Dear Sugar, and Anne Lamott’s Stitches. I even cracked open my anthologies of essays and discuss favorite essays, and more favorite essays.
About Katie
Born in Louisville. Live in Atlanta. Curious by nature. Researcher by education. Writer by practice. Grateful heart by desire.
Buy the Book!
The Stage Is On Fire, a memoir about hope and change, reasons for voyaging, and dreams burning down can be purchased on Amazon.
