‘Still Here’

Palisades-Founded Saved By A Story Hosts Wildfire Survivor Writing Workshop, Fundraising Storytelling Salon

By SARAH SHMERLING | Editor-in-Chief

Palisadian Kathleen Katims has been “empowering voices, building community” and “changing lives—one story at a time” for over 10 years. Now, following the January fires, she has built a space for wildfire survivors from Pacific Palisades and Altadena to come together to share their stories.

Founded a decade ago, Saved By A Story hosts “free community writing workshops for under-resourced and under-served populations” to “empower voices and build connection.” More than 500 storytellers have participated in programming to date.

“I really wanted to bring community together,” Katims, who has lived in the Palisades for 30 years, said of the launch of her efforts a decade ago. “I love writing and storytelling and music.”

Katims was in graduate school when she had a project that needed to connect writing and social justice, she explained. She said she thought of a project to bring people together around writing that could also be a healing experience.

“The first workshop I did was with foster youth,” Katims said. “I read an article about how for some foster youth, one of the most painful aspects is that you don’t have anybody to hold your story.”

Saved By A Story was officially launched when Katims began to bring these workshops to additional populations, running free workshops for women and teens in recovery, former foster youth, neurodiverse teenagers, parents raising neurodiverse kids, teachers, and seniors.

Beginning in November 2023, Katims started hosting Senior Writing Workshops, which took place at Palisades Branch Library. About 60 people have participated in the drop-in workshop, which now meets at Westwood Branch Library.

Saved By A Story also partners with other nonprofits to facilitate writing groups.

“It’s emboldening voices that we don’t usually hear from to get people to tell their story and get their story to the page,” Katims said. “In that process of sharing, there’s a lot of community that comes together. People become friends.”

Some of the prompts Katims has used include writing about something the person has worn that has been powerful or a love/hate relationship.

Then, in 2025, following the Palisades and Eaton fires, Katims was inspired to launch a new group.

“After losing my Pacific Palisades home in the 2025 wildfires, I created an ongoing group for other survivors to process and heal,” Katims said. “I lost more than my home in the wildfire. For me, the diaspora of community was a profound grief. I also was so overwhelmed with all the things that needed to be done that I wanted to create a space apart from the doing. I wanted to come together in community and give voice to all the things we lost and all that we were finding.”

Katims, who lost her home on the Swarthmore Bluffs, launched the Wildfire Survivor Writing Workshop in April, which originally met at the Peter Fetterman Gallery and now meets monthly at Wende Museum. She said it “helped knit our community together,” adding it gives “voice to our pain and our hope.”

“I’ve gotten to know neighbors in this extraordinary way that I never knew … what we share in the group stays in the group,” Katims said, “but it has really created connection for me and I think many people feel more connected to their neighbors … it’s a way to come together with people who have a shared, traumatic experience.”

She said the workshop offers participants a chance to set “aside the doing” of post-fire life, like fighting with insurance companies, and “getting to process what happened” through writing. Some people have written from the perspective of their house to tell the story or about their neighbors.

“Participants who have been impacted by the fires come together to write about the history of the cherished places we have been, what we have lost (and found), and how we will chart a way forward,” read a description of the workshop. “We will write to timed prompts to spark creativity, share and savor stories, and connect with friends and neighbors. Come together and write, choose to share (or not, you decide), listen and write some more.”

Writing workshop participants said they have found them “transformative,” Katims said, with “professional writers and budding voices” invited to “explore and experiment” while “writing to prompts,” which have included a “goodbye you feel like you need to say.”

“There’s a lot of understanding,” Katims said of the workshop. “I will say too, remarkably, there’s also a lot of laughter … there are tears, there is laughter, there is kind dreaming into the future, there is remembering.”

To sustain the Wildfire Survivor Writing Workshop, as well as other work, Katims hosted Saved By A Story’s annual fundraising event—a storytelling salon—on Saturday, November 1, in Venice. To date, the salons have raised more than $190,000 to help “under-resourced and under-represented people tell their story.”

“I had really wanted to bring together community after such a wrenching year,” Katims said of the event. “I also really wanted to both tell the story of the wildfire, but I also wanted to uplift people. It was, I think, the hardest show I’ve had to curate, to try to find that balance.”

While putting the show together, Katims said she was thinking about resilience and “how are we going to go forward,” but also to “face what we lost” and “the trauma of it as well.”

“The show raised $38,000 to further our mission to offer free community writing workshops for people going through difficult transitions and for under-resourced, under-represented people,” Katims said.

The salon, attended by 175 people, featured storytellers from the Palisades, Altadena and greater Los Angeles area, who shared stories and songs on the theme of “Still Here,” which Katims said “honors the resilient Palisades and Altadena communities.”

“We were curating the evening both trying to tell the story of the fire and trying to uplift people,” Katims described. “Some stories were about coming through the fire and others were about resilience in the face of other difficult circumstances: a difficult divorce, a falling out with a parent after coming out. The music by three singer/songwriters also dealt with the theme of resilience and finding your power.”

Wildfire Survivor Writing Workshop participants who performed were Shermaine Barlaan (from Altadena) and Tamara Rawitt, Jason Katims and Karen Leigh Hopkins from the Palisades.

Additional writers and storytellers who participated were Megan Chan Meinero, Chris Douridas, David Israel, Jessica Goldberg and Al Madrigal. Musicians included Priscilla Ahn, mehro and Tom Freund, curated by Liza Richardson. They closed the evening with a performance of “Forever Young” by Bob Dylan.

Israel spoke on an 11,000-mile trip across the country he took with his wife after the fire, while Douridas shared on “the day of the fire and what he did in response,” Katims described. Both writers lost their homes in the fire.

Katims’ husband, Jason, told a story from the perspective of his first plays and a short story he had written when he was younger that had not been digitized and were lost in the fire.

“Many people wrote and reflected that they were so moved and inspired by the show,” Katims said. “They were happy to be in community again, and also to get to laugh and cry about all that has happened.”

The Storytelling Salons date back to 2016, Katims said. Past performers have included Sara Bareilles, Cindy Chupack, Natasha Rothwell, K’naan, Winnie Holzman and Daveed Diggs.

Katims invited interested community members to join the Wildfire Survivor Writing Workshop, which will next meet on Saturday, December 20, from 10:30 a.m. to 12 p.m. at the Glorya Kaufman Community Center in the Wende Museum in Culver City, 10808 Culver Boulevard.

With residents displaced, people attend from as far away as Carpinteria and Ventura: “There’s people coming from everywhere,” Katims said.

“It’s an opportunity to connect with neighbors and process what’s happened and listen to what you’re hoping to find afterward,” Katims continued. “We laugh, we cry, we connect.”

For more information or to sign up for a future workshop, visit savedbyastory.com.