Choosing Curiosity Over Fear

[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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Choosing Curiosity Over Fear

I think curiosity is our friend that teaches us how to become ourselves. And it’s a very gentle friend, and a very forgiving friend, and a very constant one.
Elizabeth Gilbert

For Gilbert, creativity is about choosing curiosity over fear. That makes sense to me in the way that building is courageous. It makes sense to me in the way that light drives out darkness. It makes sense to me in the way that I have always been comfortable with questions. It makes sense to me in the way that a new journal, a blank canvas, and a piano sitting in a corner are curious.

Gilbert calls Fear out, gently. Gilbert invites Fear to sit beside her, holds and understands and maybe even comforts Fear, but does not let Fear extinguish her curiosity. Curiosity fuels the fire in the belly. Curiosity is the broken parts that let the light in. (Thank you Leonard Cohen.) Curiosity remains when all our answers fail us and we need a sure place to stand. That is curiosity’s gift, a beautiful, loving, kind place to stand in our topsy turvy, always seeking answers, wonderfully and tragically impermanent world.

Choosing Curiosity Over Fear, and On Being conversation with Elizabeth Gilbert