[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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You Are Making Me Now
You are making me now,
From Joy Ladin’s “You Are Making Me Now“
Right now, the clay of me
Warm in your hands,The hands of me warmed
By your hands that shape them, shape a heart
That’s never beaten, been beaten,
As Maxine Greene reminds us, we are not yet. We are constantly doing and becoming. That is hopeful in the way that crisis dances with opportunity. That is hopeful in the way that we are born into original grace. That is hopeful in the way creativity promises growth and change and life beyond our wildest dreams.
We are potters sitting with clay before a wheel. Hands strong and sure. Straight back. Feet planted. Eyes fixed toward the wheel as it begins to spin. The elements are in place. Our final shape unclear. Our fingers move between guiding and allowing, advance and retreat, permission and forgiveness, creation and destruction. The clay makes its own decisions.
I am not a potter, but if I were I think I would enjoy feeling everything. I would enjoy feeling it all. The cold damp clay. The rotation of the wheel beneath my fingers. The vibration of the wheel radiating from my fingers, through my arms, into my spine. The dance with the wheel as it leads. The moment when the clay decides the ultimate shape it will take.
Life is a potter’s dance. A series of beautiful movements in which our biggest tasks are to remember, pay attention, and create. To love ourselves and the world so much that we allow the clay to become. To find beauty in the becoming. To trust the our hands and voice and heart so much that we imagine and build and share. To see the not yet in every turn of the wheel and work to make it so.
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.
