Presented as a conversation rather than as a single-voiced academic paper, this paper describes the three people's experiences with experimental academic writing as students and as teachers. It describes such writing (or autobiographical scholarship) as a hybrid blend of autobiographical bits and scholarship, writing and reading, public and private, accessibility and specificity which is inspired by or collaborates with feminist, anti-elitist, multi-ethnic, reader-response, ecocritical, and postmodern theories. The paper then describes teaching experimental kinds of writing alongside more traditional forms, and notes that experimental writing helps students who have felt less engaged with standard academic writing to discover voices they had closeted and enables them to enter the conversation where conformity to standard approaches had left them mute. According to the paper, the writing teachers have also noted that experimental writing draws students into what they are writing about in interesting ways. It is then noted that experimental writing raises new questions about evaluating writing--evaluating experimental writing requires more dialogue with the writer to understand the experiment. The paper concludes that although experimental writing requires more dialogue with students, teachers think of their students more as writers and the students respond more as writers--with skills, knowledge, intention, and an ability and desire to learn and to use writers' tools. (RS)