What does it mean to take a writerly approach to research? Sondra Perl and her co-authors have pondered this question over the past five years as they have each worked with her to design and draft dissertations that combine their work as literacy researchers with their love of writing. Each of them has moved toward storytelling as a compelling and valid way to reveal the data they have gathered. Their writerly decisions, however, do not come without consequences. As she met with each of them individually, and now as they have composed this article collaboratively, they have asked themselves, over and over again: How much narrating versus theorizing? How much showing versus telling? How much authorial presence versus straight reporting? Eventually, they have arrived at an even larger question: What allows a story to be accepted as research? What, in other words, gives it credibility? In this article, Tim McCormack, Beth Counihan, and Emily Schnee provide a few telling moments from the hundreds of pages of their dissertations. Though they have differing tastes, styles and ways of being in the world, they give one a glimpse of what is possible when researchers aim not only to tell stories but also, and to differing degrees, include themselves in the storytelling. Storytelling devices and attention to voice enable them to present data from their research in ways that more traditional reporting methods would not have allowed. Happily, all of their dissertations were successfully defended, more evidence that, taken as a whole, these stories "pass muster as scholarship."