Weekly Wide-Awake: There is no Frigate like a Book

[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: There is no Frigate like a Book

There is no Frigate like a Book/To take us Lands away/Nor any Coursers like a Page/Of prancing Poetry./This Traverse may the poorest take/Without oppress of Toll;/How frugal is the Chariot/That bears the Human Soul!
Emily Dickinson

I have returned to books in 2020. In a year when we have to squint sideways to find gifts, that is perhaps the biggest gift this year has given. Not that I ever really left my love of books, but 2020 gave me space to board the great Frigate of which Dickinson writes and travel and learn and connect with books in ways that I did all the time when I was younger, but have not in recent years. I started the Books Falling Club in April to rise above pandemic dread. I wrote through the isolation every day and collected a portion of my Books Falling posts in Books Falling Club: Volume I.

This week I pulled together a second volume of Books Falling Club posts for the Weekly Wide-Awake. I shared the wisdom of Pema Chodron’s When Things Fall Apart. I looked to the gifts of “food life” in Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. I learned about small acts of big love in Sue Bender’s Everyday Sacred. I continued to learn about the Quaker tradition in Robert Lawrence Smith’s A Quaker Book of Wisdom. I connected with my cheetah self in Glennon Doyle’s Untamed. I felt good to explore these waters.

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