In currently dominant accounts, English as a school subject, its content and processes, are construed as an induction into a well-defined, already-established disciplinary discourse or set of discourses. In an attempt to challenge this version of English, I present some examples of autobiographical writing by secondary students and I tell the story of an observed lesson. From these instances of practice, a different picture of English emerges -- one where the English classroom might be regarded as a place of literary sociability, where students enter into dialogue with each other and with the literature that they read, and where the complex challenges entailed in any attempt to represent experience in words is properly acknowledged.