[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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Send In The Clowns
Isn’t it rich?
Isn’t it queer?
Losing my timing this late
In my career
Where are the clowns?
There ought to be clowns
Well, maybe next year
Donna Murphy singing “Send In The Clowns” from Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music
Losing my timing has been a recurring theme of my life. In the last couple of years, I have fallen in love with the idea of perfect timing. How can time be both lost and perfect? I have certainly felt both loss and perfection at different points along my path. Times when I have not known what to do or where to go. Times when I have been the exact right place with the exact right people. It reminds me of a wave. Let me explain. There is no judgment or design in a wave, it is water flowing out and back in. The water is neither lost nor perfect when it flows. It is simply powerful and constant. Time is powerful and constant, too. It makes sense to me to look at it all — at career and relationship and home and whatever else comes across our cosmic radar — as waves, rather than as fixed states that are either lost or perfect. Truth seems more complicated. Truth seems to include both falling apart and falling back together. Truth seems to hold both loss and perfection. Wrapped in our dreams, our fears, our desires, our gifts, our faults, our as if, and our not yet, time is both loss and perfection. Like the next breath, or next wave, or next year.
About Katie
Born in 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.
