[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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Weekly Wide Awake: Desperate for Magic, Ready for Love
“For now just remember how you felt the day you were born: desperate for magic, ready to love.”
Kate Baer, from What Kind of Woman
I am still desperate for magic and ready for love. I am comforted knowing this has been the primordial case — something my soul has been working on in this body and before. Something that I will be working on in the beyond, too. Magic and love, both. Desperate and ready, both. Paying attention to it all to searching for magic and love. Holding the gem up to the light to see the shine. Jumping into the fast river to get carried by the current. Laying next to my someone to feel him breathe. Playing in imagination. Connecting with oneness.
I think about what it means to be born. What if smalls births happen throughout this life. Birth, not in the sense of being “born again,” but in the sense of new life. New like morning or spring. New like creativity or discovery. New like beginner’s mind. Birth, thought about like this, becomes something we can experience every day. Every day we find magic. Every day we can choose love.
This Weekly-Wide Awake is written in celebration of magic and love. Let me explain. Twenty years ago this week, on August 3, 2003, I defended my doctoral dissertation. That day was filled with magic and love for many reasons. It was magical in the way that the realization of a dream is magical. It was the culmination of something so personal and also so much bigger than me. That seems magical, too. I was desperate for magic and wide-awakeness was both real and magical.
That day was filled with love. It was the product of love coming from all directions. The love of mentors, friends, and family. The love of wide-awakeness and the birth of a journey that started long before that day and continues into my not yet.
On this 20th Anniversary I say thank you. Thank you for it all. Thank you for the strength to take each step. Thank you for the fact I have never been alone. Thank for wide-awakeness. Thank you for magic and love.
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.
