[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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from House of Light
There is only one question:/ how to love in this world.
Mary Oliver
What if we are born knowing how to love in this world? I believe we are born knowing how to love in this world and that somewhere along the way we forget, or become disillusioned, or cynical, or angry. If we innately know how to love in this world, a few things are true.
We would know how to connect with one another across and through and within language. The process of communication, in this case, becomes an act of love bigger than words. In this way, narrative ways of knowing (thank you Jerome Bruner) are pathways to love. Story is a pathway to love.
We would understand that love includes everything in and of this world. Nature is both in and of this world. Art is both in and of this world. What we sense — hear, taste, see, feel, and touch — is both in and of this world. What we imagine is both in and of this world. What we create is both in and of this world.
There would be a sense of perpetual morning. An ebb and flow of sunrises and sunsets. A knowing enveloped in safety and trust, sometimes joyful and sometimes sad, always within our grasp. It seems to me that is the rhythm love in this world.
Ultimately, we must each answer this question for ourselves: How to love in this world? We must quiet our heart and mind. We must look inward and reach outward. We must fall apart and back together again and again and again and find our own beautiful rhythm in that process. I think loving in this world looks like that.
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.
