[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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My Hunger
My hunger, too, has both hard and soft parts.
Franny Choi
Explain to me soft hunger. I understand hard hunger. When I am hungry, I eat food. Soft hunger feels different. It feels familiar to me in the way that desire and grief and longing are hunger. Part of the same animal, soft and hard parts move about the same body. Reaching out from the same core. Reaching up from the same feet. Reaching in toward sustenance and satiation.
I know how to feed hunger. Feeding the hard and soft parts of hunger happens together. Meals are made of food and emotion, of eating and digesting, of taking in and letting go.
I am reminded of Mary Oliver’s advice to let the soft animal of our body love what it loves. There is a relationship between hunger and love. I know it as sure as I know the flow between birth and death. I know it as sure as I know the flow between action and stillness. I know it as sure as I know the flow between joy and sorrow. Maybe hunger’s hard and soft parts are simply love — our need to give and receive love.
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.
