[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
Enter your email here to receive Weekly Wide-Awake
back
This Is Something I Had To Go Through
This Is Something I Had To Go Through, James Davis
Art is a window through which we see our personal experience. The plaque next to this sculpture reads, “This sculpture is about a particular moment in the artist’s life he was afraid. As humans, we are all faced with challenges, adversity, and fear.” As a person living with Turner syndrome, I live in the middle of something I have to go through. There is no stop and start, there is only through. The other side never comes. Peace and joy and beauty are found throughout. Between joy and sorrow. Between fear and courage. Between past and future.
When I see this sculpture, I am reminded that we are all going through things. We are not alone in our vulnerability and shame and wandering. We are not alone in our questions and pain. Our stories are full of through — the other side — never happening. We are deeply familiar with life’s impermanence. During all that, we are asked to embrace the middle space and be present. I understand the depth of carrying questions to which there is no real resolution. Perhaps resolution is found when I surrender and breathe. Perhaps through does happen. Not as an end state, but in the continual process of falling apart and falling back together. That makes sense to me.
This Is Something I Had To Go Through is hopeful. It is made more beautiful by the seasons. It sits in nature, the definitive place of through and knowing and ebb and flow. It welcomes everyone, in all our throughness, to rest for a second and then keep walking. There is hope in through.
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.
