This study explores informants' experiences in a reading/writing program that paired eighth-grade language arts students with elderly volunteers. Twenty-three pairs were followed over an academic year as they read books in common, corresponded in response journals, and met in person at program social events. Through analysis of interviews, their collaborative journals, and end-of-year questionnaires, we explored informants' preexisting conceptions of literate participation and the dynamics and perceived meanings of their participation in the partnership program. Drawing on neo-Vygotskian theory, we argue that emotion played an integral role in participants' coconstructions of meaning and that as they established trust and rapport, these correspondents set the stage for increasingly searching and often challenging conversations. Their participation illustrates the interweaving of emotion and cognition in engaged literacy and underscores the need to create opportunities for literacy learning that are at once interpersonally warm and critically astute.