[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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Museé Des Beaux Arts
About suffering they were never wrong,
From W.H. Auden’s “Museé Des Beaux Arts”
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
Suffering is a part of life’s falling apart and coming together. Simple or complex. Fast or slow. Huge or minute. A thousand small cuts or a gaping wound. Somewhere inside suffering our stories converge like waves, soil, sand, or tree rings. Somewhere inside suffering our tears and breath soothe and comfort. Somewhere inside suffering life happens.
For me, that is what Auden suggests the old Masters understood. They understood the intimacy of suffering and the delicate balance between paying attention and feeling pain, between being awake and being asleep, between being alive and dying. They understood that suffering connects us all. They painted or wrote or sang or strummed or stitched or played from the part of themselves that knew suffering deep down. Maybe they even thought sharing suffering might heal or strengthen or hold us all in some inexplicable and miraculous and real way. They had the ability and vision to explore suffering as a creative act.
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.
