Drawn from a longitudinal ethnographic study, this article elaborates the trajectories linking one undergraduate's extracurricular journaling to her school writing and her emerging identity as a journalist. This portrait of literate development highlights how our sense of ourselves as literate persons is forged in the interplay of multiple encounters with literacy, private as well as public, and how authoring a literate life means engaging in the ongoing work of reconciling the conflicts and synergies among them. (Contains 2 figures.)