This presentation aims to highlight and discuss the dialogical relationship between poetic transcriptions (Ahlgren, 2021) and analysis of narrative interviews. The data comprises interviews with two teachers of Vietnamese in a community language (CL) school in Australia conducted in a larger linguistic ethnographic project (Reath Warren, 2017). Qualitative content and positioning analysis of interviews offer compelling insights into the teachers' migration journeys and linguistic repertoires. Moreover, the analysis reveals their reasons for teaching Vietnamese, and how their professional teacher identities are expressed in different contexts. However, representing and analyzing the teachers' thoughtful, sometimes non-standard, and emotional utterances, also involves methodological challenges (Reath Warren & Ahlgren, forthcoming). In this case, decisions made in the process of transcription relate directly to the researchers' epistemological assumptions about language and reflect and shape the theories and purposes of the research project in question. In this presentation, we will illustrate how poetic transcriptions can create a space for representing existential experience and emotion, as well as highlighting the resourcefulness of language use rather than deviance from a monolingual norm (Ahlgren, 2021). In a relation to an ideological environment, where monolingual norms emerge as a powerful factor impacting on CL teacher identity, the use of poetic transcriptions can be a way to not only highlight the seldom-heard perspectives of CL teachers but also to validate and even valorize their voices – reflecting struggle as well as proudness and hope for the future.