Taking A Walk #22

[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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Taking A Walk With bell hooks

“If love is really the active practice—Buddhist, Christian, or Islamic mysticism—it requires the notion of being a lover, of being in love with the universe … To commit to love is fundamentally to commit to a life beyond dualism. That’s why love is so sacred in a culture of domination because it simply begins to erode your dualisms: dualisms of black and white, male and female, right and wrong.” — bell hooks

The work of bell hooks helps me understand love. hooks is described as an academic, social critic, feminist, activist, and author. I have devoured the books she has written about love over the years – All About Love: New Visions, and Communion: the female search for love. I have been wading in the waters of all her work for a long time. hooks thoughts on love help me understand the concept.

Read entire post about love here.

listen little sister
angels make their hope here
in these hills
follow me
I will guide you

From Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place, by bell hooks. Quoted in Crystal Wilkinson’s Atlantic essay, “What bell hooks Knew About Being a Kentucky Writer“