This essay charts the experiences of a group of Year 10 students studying literature together. I challenge the current educational thinking that the literature classroom should consist exclusively of a set of canonised texts handed down from teacher to student. Instead I consider the importance of ensuring students have space to explore themselves in what they study. With this in mind, I attempt to bring students' culture into the classroom through storytelling; the students take part in a series of lessons where they tell, discuss and explore their own oral traditions. I explore the problem of conceptualising culture as an identity descriptor rather than as something rooted in experience, in the social and in history. I conclude that it is not some reified notion of culture but the student that should be at the centre of everything we do.