Management learning has much to gain from the study of literature to explore feelings of uncertainty, doubt and paradox; and how we communicate these feelings as essential, but often ignored areas, of being in organisational life. To illustrate this I draw on examples from Greek mythology, the melodrama of Edgar Allan Poe and a Shakespearean play. In doing so I offer an invitation as to how we might create and talk about our own stories as ways of developing our own leadership practice and have something worthwhile to say in the field of wider management learning, not as discrete case studies but as temporal processes where we have the potential to draw the reader in as an actor in the unfolding events.