[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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How Near Fairyland
The spring warmth steals into me, drying up all the tears of my soul,
From Yone Noguchi’s “How Near To Fairyland“
And gives me a flight into the vastness,—into a floorless, unroofed reverie-hall.
Spring is new life. New to the green of tall old trees. New to warmth that invites us to explore the beauty of buds and raindrops and puddles. New to magnolia and honeysuckle and azalea and rhododendron. New to the kiss of spring snow.
Winter’s tears dry in the blue green embrace of spring light. Floors and roofs and doors and windows open and expand and explode. Vastness is not too big a word. Colors vibrate in a new frequency. Smells waft like fine perfume. It all falls differently in spring. Calling it fairyland is not a stretch.
Likening spring to a fairyland might imply a distance from reality. That is simply not the truth. Spring is the reality of possibility. Spring is the reality of the not yet. Spring is the reality of mud and sunshine and bees and flowers. Spring is the reality, the tangible evidence that death and life happen in beautiful, hard, perfect time.
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.
