This study was conducted to investigate how literature and literacy could merge, what effect immersion in a particular type of literature had on the writing and oral stories the children were producing, and what effect spontaneous talk and storymaking had on the classroom literacy process. Each day for 8 weeks, 10 fifth-grade students met separately with a teacher/researcher during their regular 60-minute reading class. The 8-week session was divided into three parts: fiction and journal writing, poetry, and fiction and oral storytelling. Each session was tape recorded and transcribed to review what had happened and to see what unplanned events took the class in different directions and why. Results indicated that storytelling enabled children to produce meaning in their primary language at the same time they were formulating ideas. As a result, personal identity was able to shape, as well as be shaped by, the classroom setting when home and school cultures were successfully merged, and when talents of analogical thinking and reasoning and experience in group literacy events were tapped. Storymaking allowed the children to shape meaning from their experiences at the same time they were producing meaning, without first having to slow down the narrative momentum and lose half the story. Storymaking fostered a sociocentric classroom environment that in turn engendered more talk and storytelling. Storymaking became a pedagogical influence in itself. (Twenty-eight references are attached.) (MG)