[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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Why Write Love Poetry in a Burning World
Why write love poetry in a burning world?/ To train myself, in the midst of a burning world/ to offer poems of love to a burning world.
Katie Farris
I write love poetry. The practice of writing, for me, is an exercise in strengthening love’s muscle memory. Let me explain. Love has muscle memory. Muscle memory reminds us that life falls apart, back together, apart, and back together again. Muscle memory reminds us that we are not alone, and that connection to ourselves and others is essential to life itself. Muscle memory that reminds us that love is a balm for pain in a burning world.
Why write love poems in a burning world? Why not simply eat cake, build bigger fences, and just plan for when average folks can afford to go to other habitable planets? Why not wait for ashes, and hope you are around to ascend to whatever happens after it all burns? Why pay attention and love when witnessing and loving and burning are so painful?
Maybe love poems help us grieve together. Maybe love poems honor our natural world. Maybe love poems heal sadness. Maybe love poems teach lessons. Maybe love poems carry the women we have inside. Maybe love poems create instruments of peace.
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.
