[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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Corfu
I’ve grown lean from only eating the past
Jenny Xie
There is no sustenance in the past. The past feeds hunger and more hunger. Hunger burns and hurts and kills.
Eating the past is backwards. It tastes like competition and jealousy and rage. It solves nothing. It reconciles nothing. It knows no peace. It smells like yesterday’s salmon and cheap perfume and New York City in July. It looks like a rose bush after a deep frost and a coral reef after an oil spill and a car window after a crash. It feels like a sandpaper facial and gargling rocks and a poison ivy rash.
Eating forward feeds our soul. When we travel, we eat forward. When we create, we eat forward. When we breathe, we eat forward. We eat forward and the past becomes something else. We see something else. We feel something else. We become something else. Eating forward offers choices. Travel offers choices.
I like the idea of eating forward. Eating forward is big enough for the world. Eating forward is being full in the fullest sense of full. Eating forward builds connective tissue. Eating forward has no time to waste. Eating forward feels it all. Eating forward is perfect time.
About Katie
From 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.
