[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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WANTED Week Three
The Ohio River
I am always seeking home. I was born and raised on the Ohio River at Louisville, Kentucky. Speed boats and rope swings and King Fish. Generations and Derbies and Cardinals. Calliopes and Barges and Fossil Beds. Ohio River Valley allergies never bothered me. I drove along the River to my high school. I know upriver and downriver in my bones.
The Ohio River is a 981-mile-long waterway flowing from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Cairo, Illinois, where it meets the Mississippi River. The River runs through Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois — faster in the spring as the snow melts from the Appalachian Mountains in the East.
The name stems from the Iroquoian word Ohi:yo’ — “great river” or “beautiful river”. For thousands of years, Native Americans used the River as a major trade and transportation route. The Falls of the Ohio, a fossil bed at the McAlpin Locks where the River turns toward St. Louis, Missouri, nods to life beyond the life we know.
To this day, I return to the River. I drove along the River to the Obama field office in 2008 after his election listening to an NPR Toni Morrison interview. I lived on the River at Cincinnati, Ohio — two hours from Louisville — for 5 years in my 30s and 40s, returning closer to home after having lived all around the United States.
I admit I never really left. But, geography is bigger than place. I do not know how I am in and of. But here I am wrong, it all runs through it all.
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.
