[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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I Heard It Through the Grapevine
Don’t ya know that I heard it through the grapevine
“I Heard It Through the Grapevine” Gladys Knight and The Pips
Not much longer would you be mine
Oh, don’t ya know that I heard it through the grapevine
And I’m just about, just about, just about, to lose my mind
Oh yes, I am, Oh yes, I am, Oh yes, I am.
There are many different kinds of love. There is no hierarchy amongst loves. There are no clear boundaries amongst loves. All love shares a willingness to love outside oneself toward something greater. Right now, I want to focus on romantic love. Romantic love is an old tale. Falling in and out of love happens during the best and worst times, to the powerful and powerless, to the good and bad, at our highest heights and our lowest lows, in the best and worst ways. We know how it goes. That is why, against a backdrop of chaos and confusion, romantic love is a thread that can connects us all. (That might be a controversial idea, given the way in which love, and romantic love in particular, has become the self proclaimed provenance of a narrow minded few in recent history, but I believe it to be true.)
We know falling in love. We know heart break. We know love in all its wonder and awfulness. We know kindness and generosity. We know jealousy and pain. We know hearts a flutter and star-filled eyes. There is an innocence and faith there that allows us to escape the everyday in favor of something else — something personally significant, but globally forgettable, something earth shattering in a big enough way to distract and deflect more existential concerns. That’s why language and time are replete with love stories. Romance novels are best sellers. Love songs still top the charts (if there are still charts). Across circumstance and/or context, people fall in and out of love. They use it as a gift and/or weapon. It can tell the deepest truth or the biggest lie. Part commiseration, part celebration, part fantasy, part lamentation, part gift. There is a lift-a-glass notion to a love story the binds us together as creatures willing to look foolish, lose our equilibrium, open our soul, dance in the rain, run around in circles, and stand side-by-side.
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.
