Of love and care

[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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A shared space, of love and care, above all for the stranger.
Michael D. Higgins

Why is it particularly important to love and care for the stranger? (Shouldn’t we start by loving and caring for friends and family?) Let me start by saying an ethos of love and care is big enough to to hold a shared space for everyone.

So, in an effort to write it into being, a shared space of love and care for strangers looks like living toward generations. It looks like treating the young and old as our own. It looks like small decisions — made over time — that build strength, momentum, clarity, volume, and resonance. It looks buoyant, expansive, joyous, deep, and inviting. It embraces change as elemental to life itself.

In this space, we see our oneness. In this space, we hold us and them. In this space, our brokenness makes us whole.