[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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What Use Is Knowing Anything If No One Is Around
The dream, then: to erupt/ into a sturdier form, like a wild lotus bursting into// its tantrum of blades.
Kaveh Akbar
What if tantrums are songs that raise our truths, our multitudes, our heart’s desires? What if annihilation makes us buoyant and elastic and soft? What if, the more we know, the more we know we don’t know? What if the dream is beginner’s mind that is imaginative, curious, and creative?
On the day I defended my doctoral dissertation — almost 20 years ago to the day— I remember being told, “You will never feel like you know so little as you do on this day.” Thinking back, that makes perfect sense. Through sweat and steel, I had written a dissertation about wide-awakeness. I had turned my love of the arts, particularly drama and drama teaching, into a sturdier form — a wild lotus bursting into its tantrum of blades. The entire universe of my gaze had been focused on wide-awakeness in the high school drama classroom. Wide-awakeness in the high school drama classroom is a sliver of all there is to know, and I was an expert on it. My committee said so.
I like the idea that my dissertation became a sturdy tantrum of blades that day. That the blossom itself sang to the world the song I knew so well, that the world so desparately needed to hear.
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.
