One teacher's experience suggests that interpretive writing stemming from the reading and discussion of a literary work, in a second language, promotes development of higher-level cognitive skills. College students in an upper-division Spanish course in one institution are engaged in a writing process with three phases: preparatory; interpretive; and summative. The preparatory stage seeks to establish a common denominator of historical, linguistic, and cultural background for the reading. The interpretive phase allows students to express their own personal confrontation with the literary text, through writing about it. After reading and discussing modernist poetry by several Latin American authors, students write their own poem using specific modernist elements. After reading another text, students are asked to imagine themselves as a main character and write their own extension of events in the text. In other assignments, students are asked to contrast and compare perspectives on a problem posed in a text, assess authors' expressive techniques, and persuade others of their personal interpretation of a text. Examples of students' writing, all in Spanish, are included, with translations appended. A brief bibliography is also included. (MSE)