When students are learning to write, one-to-one teacher-student conversations taking place around the students' writing and writing processes are especially important. Two examples illustrate the multiple and connected processes of reading and writing that are associated with composing in a high school English class. The first conversation, in a ninth-grade English class, lasts one minute nineteen seconds and is "squeezed in" while the student is engaged in other class work. Collaboration permeates the conversation as the participants build on one another's offers of information, overlapping turns, sometimes completing each other's sentences. The second conversation, from an eleventh-grade American Literature class, occurs as a conference for which the student signed up to review the first draft of an essay. In the context of these one-to-one conversations, participants shape together a process of (1) analyzing real-world experience; (2) negotiating between real-world experience and text rendition; (3) generalizing from the specifics of experience into more universal truths; (4) generalizing from the specifics of the student's writing experience to more universal truths about the student's own writing process; and (5) negotiating between teacher's and student's points of view. Through the dynamic of even brief conversation, students may construct themselves as writers in the world of writers, as readers in the world of readers, and as readers/writers in the world of writers/readers. (TD)