Scholar-Practitioner Statement

HeldFast emerges directly from my work as an English professor specializing in rhetoric, composition, and narrative practice. For two decades, my teaching and scholarship have centered on how individuals use language to make meaning, negotiate identity, and participate in private, familial, and civic lives.

HeldFast extends composition pedagogy to our working lives and deaths by applying scholarly frameworks of oral history to real-world contexts of legacy and transition.

In the writing classroom, I guide students through reflective, narrative, and inquiry-based writing, helping them articulate experiences they did not initially believe “counted” as knowledge. This pedagogical foundation informs HeldFast’s methodology.

As a practitioner-scholar, I approach storytelling as an act of service, rather than an extraction or performance. My role to create conditions in which stories can emerge for oral or written preservation.

This work reflects my belief that lived experience constitutes a legitimate form of knowledge, and that preserving it is a civic act.

HeldFast Founder Kathie Marchlewski