In his essay “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” Walter Benjamin (1968) urges us to tell stories that are charged, inexhaustibly, with mystery and possibility. *How *we tell our stories, and *how *those stories release insight, matters. As anthropologists, when we render social worlds, we often pivot between ethnographic scenes and various forms of explanation, theory, and analysis. The tools of creative writing have much to offer to anthropology, perhaps namely, a means of *enacting*[1] a scene or world or set of conditions, rather than simply describing them—albeit “thickly” (Geertz 1973). Creative writing can help us embed analysis *within *the language itself (or the syntax or the structure of the writing), rather than only extend a separate explanation. Formal choices can do analytic work, alongside the thinking through of theory, and help us render the ethics and politics of our studies.…