[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: Imagination
“Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all is a form of planning.”
Gloria Steinem
The connection between imagination and planning is clear. When we build, tend, cultivate, extend, expand, breathe, cherish, and feed our imagination, our next right step emerges. Consider planning as the next right step, the next right step, the next right step, etc. — a fluid process of coming together and falling apart. Imagination is creating the next right step. It is a conversation in which our entire brain fires on all cylinders. It is the dance between wisdom and curiosity. It is the teeth that tear into experience. It is the muscle that strengthens with time and permission from a guilty or fearful or exhausted self. (In a left-brain world, imagination often has to ask for permission.) It is the still strong voice that feels like home. It is where joy and light and love abide.
Imagination is the building block of the wild new world. In the space where wordlessness, and oneness generate the connection to ourselves and others and the desire to create, imagination is the energy playground where certainty and absolutes laugh. It is the vast, expansive, universal “yes,” dream weaving, roof raising response to life’s questions. Bigger than right or wrong, good or bad, up or down, or [pick your favorite dichotomy], imagination refuses the fixed, the concrete, the seen, the known in search for something greater.
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.
