[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 Meadow
Bedeviled,
human, your plight, in waking, is to choose from the wordsthat even now sleep on your tongue, and to know that tangled
From Marie Howe’s “The Meadow“
among them and terribly new is the sentence that could change your life.
There are words that change our lives. “I do.” “It’s a girl [boy].” “The jury finds the defendant guilty [or innocent].” “We need to talk.” “You got the job.” “The tumor is malignant [or benign].” These words have a sound all their own. In a world of insignificance, their significance is unmistakeable. In a life of music, they alter life’s rhythm. In a world where living stuck is ordinary, they require movement. In a world where we often only see what we want, they require shifts in perspective. They change the trajectory of life itself.
In a meadow, a thousand sounds emerge. Despite (or because of) the sounds — of wasps, woodpeckers, ponies, and crows — the meadow remembers how to grow. Like seasons, sunshine, and earth, meadows know change and life. The sounds remind the meadow of elemental truths.
The words that change our lives are like sounds in the meadow. Part awareness. Part substance. Part pattern. Choice enters in at the moment we speak or listen. In speaking and listening we welcome the falling apart and coming together the meadow clearly understands.
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.
