Your Host
I have spent most of my life listening to other people’s stories, as a teacher, a writer, and even during my days as a bartender. My work has always included helping people find their stories, guiding their telling, and finding ways to collect and share them.
Through HeldFast, I provide gentle structure while encouraging stories to unfold in ways that respect both the living and the departed, the people speaking and the people listening.
For nearly 20 years as an English professor, I have worked with students as they develop their voices and build the confidence to share their experiences with others. In the classroom, listening means offering guidance, asking questions, and helping students say clearly what they mean.
Before teaching, I spent nearly a decade working as a news reporter, where listening came with a different kind of responsibility. I was present with people during moments of change and sometimes crisis, then relayed events to readers as faithfully as possible. Reporting required accuracy and a commitment to keeping the person or situation at the center, even when material was difficult.
Even before entering the classroom or newsroom, I was learning how conversations move like water when people are comfortable, or break with a crash when they are uncomfortable.
Behind the bar, while in college, I learned about service while experiencing people in moments of celebration, disappointment, and sometimes grief. In that role, without knowing exactly where my career would land, I was learning how people tell stories, from the mundane to the fantastical.
Across all of these roles, I learned witness and stewardship. I learned what it means to hold someone else’s words carefully, without rushing or reshaping.
Beyond those professional experiences and credentials, like most people, I have experienced personal loss. That experience has informed this work more than any degree.
I hold a master’s degree in Composition and Communication and an undergraduate degree in Journalism and Public Relations. Along with my lived experience, my education provided me with many of the tools that brought me to create HeldFast.
I live in Michigan with my family and remain connected to education, community, and the belief that when words are witnessed and held with care, they help us stay steady.
I am glad you’re here and look forward to meeting you.
Kathie Marchlewski
“The name HeldFast comes from nautical language. To holdfast is to secure a line, to stay steady against force, and to keep something from drifting when conditions are uncertain. That idea felt right for this work.”
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 is 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
Selected Scholarship
Assmann, Jan. Cultural Memory and Early Civilization. Cambridge UP, 2011.
Elbow, Peter. Writing with Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process. Oxford UP, 1998.
Frank, Arthur W. Letting Stories Breathe: A Socio-Narratology. U of Chicago P, 2010.
McAdams, Dan P. “The Psychology of Life Stories.” Review of General Psychology, vol. 5, no. 2, 2001, pp. 100–122.
Plummer, Ken. Documents of Life 2: An Invitation to a Critical Humanism. SAGE, 2001.
Portelli, Alessandro. The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History. SUNY Press, 1991.
Ritchie, Donald A. Doing Oral History. 3rd ed., Oxford UP, 2015.
Shopes, Linda. “Oral History.” The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research, edited by Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, 4th ed., SAGE, 2011.
Yancey, Kathleen Blake. Reflection in the Writing Classroom. Utah State UP, 1998.
Suggested Reading
Mitford, Jessica. The American Way of Death. Simon & Schuster, 1963.
Doughty, Caitlin. From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death. W. W. Norton & Company, 2017.
Lynch, Thomas. The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade. W. W. Norton & Company, 1997.
Lynch, Thomas. Bodies in Motion and at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality. W. W. Norton & Company, 2000.
Gallagher, Tess. Dear Ghosts. Graywolf Press, 2008.
