Abstract‘Telling’our lives as they happen to us is an extremely pervasive activity in our social world. Through the stones which suture together the multiple ways we can make sense of a life as a nurse, is woven the fabric of a culture. Clinical nursing culture is, as yet, poorly understood and little theorised. By appropriating narrative as a research technology I suggest that we might be better placed to first articulate, and then critique, the complexity and diversity of clinical practice through a postmodern poetics and politics of orality.