A multicultural literature course at Loyola Marymount University (California) was designed to complicate ideas of culture with gender issues and explored a common but largely unexplored phenomenon--writers who write outside their own personal backgrounds and identities. The course drew from research on "women's way of knowing" and "women's way of writing." The first step in the course was reading cross-cultural and cross-gendered literature. The next phase involved students experimenting with cross-cultural and cross-gendered texts of their own. The students began with short, analytic assignments that helped them focus in on techniques authors used to create a character. Students then described a kitchen from the point of view of a man or a woman (whichever they were not) whose child had just died--they could not mention the death directly. The students then moved on to writing fiction. (Six student fiction excerpts are attached.) (RS)