Weekly Wide Awake: Making Hope and History Rhyme

[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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Weekly Wide Awake: Making Hope and History Rhyme

History says / Don’t hope on this side of the grave / But then, once in a lifetime / The longed-for tidal wave / Of justice can rise up / And hope and history rhyme.
Seamus Heaney

I have really struggled to think of an overarching topic for this Weekly Wide-Awake. Typically, a theme emerges as I write. This week I struggled. I wrote about our connections, dharmas, beginning, starting, racism, and letting our life speak. Nothing really resonated until I listened to Joe Biden’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. In his speech, he quoted renowned Irish poet Seamus Heaney.

That made me think about hope and history. What would it look like to make hope and history rhyme? What might that even mean? In thinking through this week, perhaps each of us, in our way, is asked to make hope and history rhyme. We are asked to connect with another, navigate life’s challenges and traumas, simply start, and let our live’s speak. Hope and history converge when we let our lives speak.

Read this week’s Weekly Wide-Awake here.