[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 “Path of totality”
Behind everyone who walks into a room is a centipede of their pasts. If they walk into a train and ride, so do their pasts.
Niina Pollari
What if we are all a hundred of feet of pasts and all just wiggling through time and space not wanting to crash into anyone or be too weird or noticeable or toxic in the wrong kind of way? What if our pasts were visible and upfront and immune to secrets or lies or weight and immediately (because of their shared nature) become antidotes to shame, building blocks for healing and growth, and connection points for us all. What if our path of totality is the way of the centipede with 100 feet of pride and understanding and kindness.
In that way, our pasts become our super powers.
Our past, all 100 feet of it, make us stronger and wiser and (potentially) gentler (having learned the 100 feet lesson of the harm caused by hard, cold, rigid things). A hundred feet past challenges our understanding of resilience, as resilience becomes an attitude or approach to life rather than the actions of heroes left to face the world alone. A hundred feet past (where we all crawl together) connects our stories in common details where we can see each other in the specificity. A hundred feet past is beautiful in the way that we are all beautiful and desire to be seen and loved. When I think about it that way, my centipede self keeps creeps and crawls along a path of totality.
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.
