[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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Sentences become presents.
Sentences become presents. Presents passed over back walls, outside the front gates, on the streets.
Dorothy Nelson
I am thinking about narrative gratitude. I am thinking about the deep gratitude I feel for words and story and connection and belonging. I am thinking about books and plays and essays and poems that live and breathe. I am thinking about the beauty of sentences shared on pages, between strangers. (There is something uniquely beautiful about the beauty of sentences shared between strangers.) I am thinking about sentences that hold secrets gently in safe spaces, and set them free when our hearts are ready. I am thinking about sentences as connective tissue that allows healing to occur.
Sentences become presents when they are shared. Sentences become presents when they fall from bookshelves. Sentences become presents when they arrive as kindness between friends and strangers. Sentences become presents in book clubs and libraries and stories, passed down for generations.
So what is it all about? Present sentences that build and change us, way down deep? I think it’s about our basic desire to understand one another. Our basic desire to be seen. Our basic desire to share what we love in common. (Thank you Ross Gay for the idea we must share what we love in common.) Our basic desire to move from noise to quiet, empty to running over, conflict to peace.
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.
