[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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All My Friends Are Finding New Beliefs
All my friends are finding new beliefs.
From Christian Wiman’s “All My Friends Are Finding New Beliefs“
This one converts to Catholicism and this one to trees.
In a highly literary and hitherto religiously-indifferent Jew
God whomps on like a genetic generator.
Paleo, Keto, Zone, South Beach, Bourbon.
Exercise regimens so extreme she merges with machine.
I am no stranger to new beliefs. I have tried more diets, workouts, fashions, and cities than I care to recount. I have tried so much bourbon, I get ill after two Old Fashioneds. I have joined friends in embracing many of these new beliefs. Spurred on mostly by hope and desperation, I want to believe in new beliefs with every fiber of my being.
New beliefs are like sedimentary rock. They exist layer upon layer, composed of one substance then the next, building and deepening as learning and growth happen. New beliefs do not exist separate from old beliefs, they are built upon them. A river runs through all new beliefs. The river is pace. The river is appetite. The river is perseverance. The river is impermanence. The river is original grace.
The stories told by the rock of our beliefs is revealed over time. They are more than bolts of chaos requiring immediate correction, life hacks that promise amazing results, or quick fixes that leave us almost immediately where we started to begin with. (My hamster wheel of unsuccessful attempts to out run just about everything has taught me that.) New beliefs are powerful. They evolve from the deeply personal space where values and identity and self live. New beliefs become solid behaviors that create the not yet life.
About Katie
From 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.
