In this article, Mary Soliday discusses her observation that within the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (DALN), the narrators frequently attribute their desire to read and write in the present with specific textual encounters they had had in the past. In these encounters, the text (often a literary text) helped narrators to mediate relationships: in these tales, genuine literacy emerges from genuine social connection. Narrators sometimes focus their encounters by dwelling on the text as a sensual object or visual image, or by describing a moment of shared performance, storytelling, and reading aloud. Narrators then use these encounters to memorialize their connections to others but also to acknowledge the complexity of past literate selves. Through these textual encounters, the narrators endow private emotional moments with broader public meaning. For some, the private encounter spurs them to pass on their habits and their books to others in their immediate circle. For others, the private encounter widens the circle as narrators hold competing literacies in equal tension. Ultimately, Soliday says, that the DALN offers to her--to writing teachers--the desire to create democratic spaces where dynamic textual encounters can occur.