[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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The Falls of the Ohio

I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than to teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.
e.e. cummings

Growing up on the Ohio River in Louisville, Kentucky, I visited the Falls of the Ohio. The Falls are a 390 million-year-old fossil bed on the river’s floor. Fossils tell the river’s geological story of how the river has sung and danced for millennia. As a writer and storyteller, I deeply connect with the wonder, strength, and constancy. Our natural world tells us all about all of that.

My first dream career was to be a geologist.

I have always been fascinated by the Falls’ story. My family took tours of the Falls guided by geologists who could interpret the stone, sand, and bones. The fossils connected me to my earth, river, home, and story. The fossils were substances in a world that often slipped through my fingers. The fossils gave me a glimpse of the vastness of life and time itself. That always made me feel better. The fossils proved that my life — my existence — fits into a much bigger narrative that does not begin and end with me. Geologists were grand interpreters of a language I wanted to understand. Maybe, if you think about it sideways, writing is the way I interpret the science (and art) of my life. So, I guess I am not off course from my early life plan.

Sand from the Falls

My husband suggested we have a sand ceremony at our wedding. Ours was no average sand ceremony with random sand. During our wedding, our mothers poured sand we had collected from the Falls and Virginia Beach (where he grew up) from two separate cylinders into a single cylinder. The cylinder sits in our living room. As told in the sand from our birthplaces, our stories are distinct and similar.

Stones and Fossils

Like those in the Falls, fossils tell how the Ohio riverbed has been smoothed, carved, worn, and polished over time. Fossils are evidence of our interconnectedness with our earth and the force of nature. They are history, evolution, and change. They are powerful, infinite, and wise. They are transcendence, strength, and story.