In this paper, the author makes a case for why stories are important for learning: why they can provide the conditions to listen to the expelled voices, otherwise drowned even by those who are left leaning, and how they can challenge some political premises. She proposes that art and narrative are resources for political imagination and for political recovery: they link people to unthought spaces, to spaces that thought refuses. She also makes a case for the value of stories for learning how to think about alterity. She offers a method for reading stories and what insights people might gain from them. Her method breaks down the difference between real and fictional stories. It requires that people think about the relationship between the story teller and the story. She then discusses how this method might be used to reread Gayatri Spivak's representation of a woman's story in "Can the Subaltern Speak," now a landmark in feminist and postcolonial studies.