In this article, the author talks about a diary project that arose from a situation that was both an opportunity and a challenge. While teaching in Vietnam in the spring of 2004, the author received an invitation from the national university in Hanoi. The letter asked him to teach there and specifically to develop a postgraduate course called Literature in Language Teaching. Because such a course had long been his dream, he accepted it. Over the summer, however, he was warned that due to red tape the course might not be approved for the fall semester and could well be delayed until the following year. Instead, in mid-August, he was asked to teach the new course as a special elective and to start it in 3 weeks. This article is a situated inquiry that recounts and analyzes what happened next, presenting a layered, reflective analysis centered around course design and professional development in a teacher education classroom belonging to nonnative-English-speaking (NNES) teachers. The research is written in this form in order to acknowledge more fully its embedded and contextualized nature as well as to explore in more self-conscious ways the interactions between the NNES course participants and the author, their native-English-speaking (NES) teacher educator. The intention is to disclose or discover thicknesses and textures in the experience, thus enriching implications or potential applications for other contexts.