Getting students to read actively for a required introductory course in literature poses several challenges, to say nothing of trying to make required reading personally meaningful. This essay outlines assignments that encourage students to make literature meaningful by establishing personal connections to texts in ways that can also impact learning and development. The assignments are inspired by what Adams (2008) calls image-texts, works whose forms attempt to remember and re-present lived experiences of crisis or trauma for the purpose of learning from the past. Students use image-texts as models for their own self-reflective writing, while also thinking critically about the form in which to express their own stories.