[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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When I Tell My Husband I Miss the Sun, He Knows
against each other. We bring the shadow game home
and (this is my favorite part) when we
stretch our shadows across the bed, we get so tangled
my husband grips his own wrist,
certain it’s my wrist, and kisses it.
From Paige Lewis’ When I Tell My Husband I Miss the Sun, He Knows
This poem is an ode to intimacy. Intimacy where playfulness and understanding live. Intimacy where knowing and stillness happen. Intimacy born of compassion that is never cruel. Intimacy where our shadows dance.
I love the image of tangled shadows and gentle kisses. It reminds me that intimacy is mysterious and joyous. It reminds me that intimacy is simple and beautiful. Simple is not easy. I mean simple like always open and always kind. (All of which are aspects of ourselves that are difficult to know in our often hard and relentless world.)
M. Scott Peck defines love as, “The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” Within that, love is the heart of intimacy. It encompasses holding tight and letting go, success and failure, honesty and forgiveness, dreaming and building, imagination and faith, soft and hard, light and dark, shadows and broad daylight, and falling apart and coming back together. Like sweet games and confidences, traditions and rituals, big tables and open doors, and breathe itself.
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.
