hermit crab essay rejection letter

The Hermit Crab Essay: Brenda Miller Unshells her Own

by Mark Alvarez

A hermit crab essay is one that imitates a non-literary text—recipe, obituary, rejection letter—using the found form in novel ways, but retaining the semantic resonance of the original. Brenda Miller , who with Suzanne Paola coined the term in 2003, said that one of the benefits of working with these restrictions is creative expansion.

“It lets us get out of our own way,” Miller said at the 2018 Nonfiction Now conference in Phoenix, Arizona. “Following form dictates content, allowing writers to engage their imagination.”

To give an example of how this can occur, Miller discussed the process behind her essay, “ We Regret to Inform You ,” originally published in The Sun .

The essay began as a parody of rejection letters, using their form to write about her own personal experiences. One rejection letter is from to an elementary school artist from her art class; another for “the position of girlfriend of the star of the high-school football team.”

Even in the short space of the panel, Miller trained the audience how to react to her piece. The first two letters were funny, filled with solid jokes. We were laughing—emotion was sounded. When the third letter turned out to be about her miscarriage, there were audible sighs and moans. That reaction would not have occurred if Miller hadn’t first set us up with comic material and invited us to engage physically with her piece through laughter.

The form of the rejection letter allowed Miller to write about such a difficult subject.

“This voice is so detached, I can say whatever I want,” Miller said. “Humor naturally arises when coupling detached voice with intimate experience.”

The tonal shift from the essay’s early light moments to the pathos of the later was unexpected, even for Miller.

“The form of the rejection letter created an entirely new universe where personal narrative doesn’t belong to you,” Miller said. “It creates better meanings than you could yourself.”

“Who am I to question the ferocity of an essay in progress?” Miller said. “Eventually story goes beyond the form. This is exactly what hermit crabs do—outgrow their shell and get another.”

Miller teaches the hermit crab essay so often that her classes at Western Washington University have mastered it. Now she teaches how not to do the traditional hermit crab essay.

“Hermit crab essays have become so normal,” Miller said. To fight this ossification, she offers several tips:

• Inhabit the form with the voice of the form
• Ask yourself why you are using the form
• Think about how to make it not about you, but something bigger
• How do you end the thing? A lot of hermit crab essays just end, stop, without ever reaching something grander or crescendo.

In honor of the last point, I offer you a crappy ending.

But I also offer a much deeper essay by Miller on her process writing “We Regret to Inform You,” published in Brevity .

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The Shared Space Between Reader and Writer: A Case Study

Brenda Miller

I often teach classes on the form of the “hermit crab” essay, a term Suzanne Paola and I used in our textbook Tell It Slant . Hermit crab essays adopt already existing forms as the container for the writing at hand, such as the essay in the form of a “to-do” list, or a field guide, or a recipe. Hermit crabs are creatures born without their own shells to protect them; they need to find empty shells to inhabit (or sometimes not so empty; in the years since I’ve begun using the hermit crab as my metaphor, I’ve learned that they can be quite vicious, evicting the shell’s rightful inhabitant by force).

When I teach the hermit crab essay class, we begin by brainstorming the many different forms that exist for us to plunder for our own purposes. Once we have such a list scribbled on the board, I ask the students to choose one form at random and see what kind of content that form suggests. This is the essential move: allowing form to dictate content. By doing so, we get out of our own way; we bypass what our intellectual minds have already determined as “our story” and instead become open and available to unexpected images, themes and memories. Also, following the dictates of form gives us creative nonfiction writers a chance to practice using our imaginations, filling in details, and playing with the content to see what kind of effects we can create.

I’ve taught the hermit crab class many, many times over the years, in many different venues. So, often it’s tempting for me to sit out the exercise; after all, what else could I possibly learn? But after just a minute, it becomes too boring to watch other people write, so I dive in myself, with no expectation that I’ll write anything “good.” In one class, I glanced at the board we had filled with dozens of forms. And my eye landed on “rejection notes.” So that is where I began:

April 12, 1970

Dear Young Artist:

Thank you for your attempt to draw a tree. We appreciate your efforts, especially the way you sat patiently on the sidewalk, gazing at that tree for an hour before setting pen to paper, the many quick strokes of charcoal executed with enthusiasm. But your drawing looks nothing like a tree. In fact, the smudges look like nothing at all, and your own pleasure and pride in said drawing are not enough to redeem it. We are pleased to offer you remedial training in the arts, but we cannot accept your “drawing” for display.

With regret and best wishes,

The Art Class

Andasol Avenue Elementary School

Well, once one gets on the subject of rejection, you can imagine how the material simply flows through one’s fingertips. And I’m not really thinking about the content at all; I’m engaged in honing the voice of the rejection note, creating a persona on the page that can “speak back” to me, in a humorous way, all that had gone unspoken in real life. I’m having an immensely good time.

Here’s one that comes early on in the essay:

October 13, 1975

Dear 10 th Grader:

Thank you for your application to be a girlfriend to one of the star players on the championship basketball team. As you can imagine, we have received hundreds of similar requests and so cannot possibly respond personally to every one. We regret to inform you that you have not been chosen for one of the coveted positions, but we do invite you to continue hanging around the lockers, acting as if you belong there. This selfless act serves the team members as they practice the art of ignoring lovesick girls.

The Granada Hills Highlanders

P.S: Though your brother is one of the star players, we could not take this familial relationship into account. Sorry to say no! Please do try out for one of the rebound girlfriend positions in the future.

So I’m going along chronologically, calling up (and enhancing, exaggerating, manipulating) all the slights and hurts of an ordinary life. I’m having a marvelous time, because this voice is so detached it can say whatever it wants. I’m submitting to the voice of the essay, allowing the form to lead me where it will go.

And as I follow that voice, the notes begin to demand more room, wanting to break free of the concise form and allow for more in-depth story. Now that I’ve established the voice of the form, I can expand on that voice to create more variety and narrative. I can also broaden the concept of the rejection note in order to create sections that work for the subject matter. For example:

December 10, 1978

Dear College Dropout:

Thank you for the short time you spent with us. We understand that you have decided to terminate your stay, a decision that seems completely reasonable given the circumstances. After all, who knew that the semester you decided to come to UC Berkeley would be so tumultuous: that unsavory business with Jim Jones and his bay area followers, the mass suicide, an event that left us all reeling. After all, who among us has not mistakenly followed the wrong person, come close to swallowing poison?

And then Harvey Milk was shot. A blast reverberating across the bay. It truly did feel like the world was falling apart, we know that. We understand how you took refuge in the music of the Grateful Dead, dancing until you felt yourself leave your body behind, caught up in their brand of enlightenment. But you understand that’s only an illusion, right?

And given that you were a drama major, struggling on a campus well known for histrionics and unrest: well, it’s only understandable that you’d need some time to “find yourself.” You’re really too young to be in such a city on your own. When you had your exit interview with the Dean of Students, you were completely inarticulate about your reasons for leaving, perhaps because you really have no idea. You know there is a boy you might love, living in Santa Cruz. You fed him peanuts at a Dead Show. You imagine playing house with him, growing up there in the shadows of large trees.

But of course you couldn’t say that to the Dean, as he swiveled in his chair, so official in his gray suit. He clasped his hands on the oak desk and waited for you to explain yourself. His office looked out on the quad where you’d heard the Talking Heads playing just a week earlier. And just beyond that, the dorm where the gentleman you know as “pink cloud” provided you with LSD in order to experience more fully the secrets the Dead whispered in your ear. You told the Dean none of this, simply shrugged your shoulders and began to cry. At which point the Dean cleared his throat and wished you luck.

We regret to inform you that it will take quite a while before you grow up, and it will take some cataclysmic events of your own before you really begin to find the role that suits you. In any case, we wish you the best in all your future educational endeavors.

UC Berkeley Registrar

And then, as the years from my past go by, I find that the essay is leading me somewhere I didn’t expect. I actually pause and say to the essay, “we’re really going there?” and the essay says, of course we are! So, I find myself here:

October 26, 1979

Dear Potential Mom,

Thank you for providing a host home for us for the few weeks we stayed in residence. It was lovely but, in the end, didn’t quite work for us. While we tried to be unobtrusive in our exit, the narrowness of your fallopian tubes required some damage. Sorry about that. You were too young to have children anyway, you know that, right? And you know it wasn’t your fault, not really…Still, we enjoyed our brief stay in your body and wish you the best of luck in conceiving children in the future.

With gratitude,

Ira and Isabelle

So, as you can tell, the essay takes a turn there, or maybe “turn” is not the right word; it slows down and peers below the surface. It tells me this is where we were going all along. I’ve written about this material so many times in the past, that I didn’t feel I would ever return to it. But the essay demanded it, and who am I to question the ferocity of an essay in progress?

And this time I feel a kind of transformation happening, a new perspective, a moment of forgiveness. It’s odd to feel this in one’s writing, to feel so concretely that the essay is, indeed, in charge: speaking to you, telling you things you didn’t already know. And this happened solely because of the form. The form of the rejection note—though it began as a technical exercise—created an entirely new universe in which one’s personal narrative does not really belong to you.  And because it doesn’t belong to you, it can create meanings—perhaps better meanings—than any you might have thought up on your own.

The essay, now titled “We Regret to Inform You” (what else could it be?), moves, as it must, as life does, quickly through this time period. It has created its own momentum and can’t stop now! The essay has also now provided me with a theme that can echo through the rest of the sections. For example:

June 30, 1999

Dear Applicant:

Thank you for your query about assuming the role of stepmother to two young girls. While we found much to admire in your résumé, we regret to inform you that we have decided not to fund the position this year. You did ask for feedback on your application, so we have the following to suggest:

• You do not yet understand the delicate emotional dynamic that rules a divorced father’s relationship with his children. The children will always, always, come first, trumping any needs you, yourself, may have at the time. You will understand this in a few years, but for now you still require some apprenticeship training.
• Though you have sacrificed time and energy to support this family, it’s become clear that your desire to stepmother stems from some deep-seated wound in yourself, a wound you are trying to heal by using these children. Children are intuitive, though they may not understand what they intuit. They have enough to deal with–an absent mother, a frazzled father–they don’t need your traumas entering the mix.
• Seeing the movie “Stepmom” is not an actual tutorial on step-parenting.
• On Mother’s Day, you should not expect flowers, gifts, or a thank you. You are not their mother.
• You are still a little delusional about the true potential here for a long-term relationship. The father is not yet ready to commit, so soon after the rather messy divorce. (This should have been obvious to you when he refused to hold your hand, citing that it made him “claustrophobic.” Can you not take a hint?)

As we said, funding is the main criteria that led to our rejection of your offer. We hope this feedback is helpful, and we wish you the best in your future parenting endeavors.

Through several revisions of the draft—which included nearly twice as many letters as represented in the final version (as I said, once you get on the subject of rejection, you can really go on and on and on)—I honed the themes I saw rising in the essay through, or perhaps in spite of, the harsh voice of the rejection note. There was the ostensible theme of children or lack thereof, but more insistently there was the theme of how we find the roles one is suited to play in one’s life. So I kept the letters that had echoes of that theme and deleted the rest. I highlighted the theme through key words and phrases to create a fragmented piece that felt coherent and satisfying.

Throughout the process—both drafting and revising—I did not feel the emotional weight of any of the material. In fact, I was laughing most of the time, inordinately pleased with my cleverness. Humor naturally arises when we couple a detached voice with intimate stories, and since audiences are also usually laughing throughout the essay, the weight of that turn in the middle almost has more impact than if I had started with this material as the destination. And we get through it quickly. It’s one moment in a series of moments that accumulate to a greater end.

So, the essay gets published in The Sun, and I receive lots of responses, more than I’ve ever received for any essay in my life. I’ve written about a lot of personal material over the years, but this essay seems to have struck a deeper chord. And I think people are touched by “We Regret to Inform You” not because of the revelation of my personal “rejections,” but because I’ve used a form that invites readers into both my experience and their own. By being ensconced in a more objective form, the essay provides what I’ll call a “shared space” between reader and writer. We often wonder how to make our personal stories universal; well, perhaps it’s not a question of making our stories do anything. Maybe, instead, we simply need to provide common ground in the form of an object we use together. We sit down at the same table and the stories pass between us.

Brenda Miller  directs the MFA in Creative Writing and the MA in English Studies at Western Washington University . She is the author of four essay collections, including  Listening Against the Stone ,  Blessing of the Animals , and  Season of the Body . She also co-authored  Tell It Slant: Creating, Refining and Publishing Creative Nonfiction  and  The Pen and The Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World . Her work has received six Pushcart Prizes.

Miller’s Brevity craft essay is adapted from an August 2014 craft talk she presented at the Rainier Writing Workshop .

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Unpacking the Hermit Crab Essay: A Reading List

Before I began writing personal essays, I was an academic. My training was in classics and history of medicine, two fields that allowed me to assert my intellectual invulnerability while talking about deeply personal topics—sexuality, mental illness, femininity—within the armor of conference papers, journal articles, book reviews, and a monograph. Close readings of ancient medical texts allowed me to explore in subterranean ways my family history of anorexia. Quotations from early Christian preachers functioned like found text through which I could begin to comprehend how ministers in my childhood churches had warped my passageway into adulthood as a queer person. Footnotes gave me room to skip-jump over sources and scholarship, sliding in comic asides and ironic juxtapositions, to spin the reader around and offer a glimpse of connections that went unexamined in the argument itself. 

Perhaps because of this history, I find hermit crab essays fascinating. First named as such by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola in Tell It Slant , hermit crab essays steal conventionalized forms (such as math tests, prescriptions, rejection letters, syllabi) as “shells” to contain and protect the material within. The form refines the game I played as a scholar: taking a serious, perhaps even pompous, structure and then teasing it out to examine a question about oneself, one’s relationships and take on the world.

Margot Singer, “On Scaffolding, Hermit Crabs, and the Real False Document” (in Bending Genres: Essays on Creative Nonfiction ) 

Singer situates hermit crabs in the tradition of using fake documentary evidence, such as newspaper reports in novels. Yet, as she argues, hermit crabs contribute something innovative to how we think about creative nonfiction in particuklar, transforming the essay from a linear string of sentences to a structure such as a house or a room (as in the “stanza”) that the writer and reader might inhabit.

What moved me: The hermit crab essay as a house. Any essay as a house. The way it takes time to settle after a move, to become familiar with which floorboards creak, where precisely the light falls in the morning. The way buildings construct sight-lines and passageways, signal or obscure their contents, change as they pass among inhabitants.

Chelsea Biondolillo, On Shells

A t first sight, “On Shells” is a simple braided essay that intertwines memoir of Biondolillo’s grandmother, who had a passion for beach-combing, with reflections on using the hermit crab essay in creative writing classrooms. Yet, it emerges quickly as a hermit crab essay on the craft of hermit crab essays: through fragmentary paragraphs (broken shells), Biondolillo suggests that we can learn something about writing from the practice of beach-combing. Biondolillo communicates her insights through juxtaposition: what the conchologist says about the hermit crab we can, with the author’s encouragement, apply to our own writing practice. 

What moved me: Discovering unique, never-before-seen shells is not the point. Instead, stay alert and curious about what washes up on your own shores.

Suzanne Cope, The Essay as Bouquet

Various writers have offered accounts of what it is in particular that hermit crabs do. A good example is Suzanne Cope’s examination of hermit crab essays that take forms connected to the natural world: she finds that few imitate natural forms; instead, hermit crab essays that brush up against “nature” tend to explore the entanglement of wilderness and human interference. 

What moved me: Hermit crab essays as the exploration of breakages and imperfection.

Randon Billings Noble, Consider the Platypus: Four Forms—Maybe—of the Lyric Essay  

Each form of the lyric essay t hat Noble discusses—flash, fragmentary, braided, and hermit crab—uses structure to explore its central theme. Hermit crab essays, according to Noble, protect what is vulnerable and contain excess; further, they are social creatures, relying on (literary) networks for their construction of meaning.

What moved me: Hermit crab essays as an exercise in connection.

Susan Mack, The Hermit Crab Essay: Forming a Humorous Take on Dark Memoir

Hermit crab essays are associated with vulnerability, and many are about traumatic experiences. Is this a necessary feature? (Biondolillo, in On Shells , reports being asked this question by her students.) The answer is probably not, although they do lend themselves to difficult material. As Mack explores, hermit crabs not only provide protection but also can be enormously funny. Humor thrives in unexpected juxtapositions, which is the daily fare of the hermit crab form.

What moved me: Hermit crab essays as an opportunity to stop taking myself so damn seriously.

Rich Youman, Haibun & the Hermit Crab: “Borrowing” Prose Forms

Juxtaposition is at the heart of Youman’s exploration of the potential of hermit crab essays within the traditional Japanese form known as the haibun, where prose and haiku work together. As Youman shows, the hermit crab’s borrowed form, which is often documentary or official, can heighten the contrast with the haiku.

What moved me: The in-rush of breath as the haiku brings the glimpse of mundane reality to an abrupt and delicate pause.

Brenda Miller, The Shared Space Between Read and Writer: A Case Study

Hermit crab essays are a useful classroom tool for various reasons: constraints loosen creative inhibitions; the form serves as a disguise, which can support self-conscious writers in sharing vulnerable material; the exercise trains writers to pay attention to how texts are constructed. Telling the story of how she wrote her hermit crab essay We Regret to Inform You while teaching, Miller emphasizes how form dictates content, giving the writer room to experiment. 

What moved me: Don’t write the essay and then manipulate it into an unusual form for the sake of gimmick. Instead, find a form that intrigues you and let it shape what you are trying to say.

Kim Adrian (ed.), The Shell Game

Adrian’s introduction to this recent anthology of hermit crab essays mimics an entry in a natural history encyclopedia. Hermit crabs, Adrian writes, are part of a tradition of hybrid forms, but they also reflect current interest in challenging inherited categories and binaries. While they sometimes appear to be a kind of party trick, they are, in another light, the very epitome of the essay—the attempt to express the interior self through the clumsy vessel of writing that so often pretends to be about something else.

What moved me: Hermit crab essays as drag. Just as drag offers overt performances of the deconstruction of traditional gender, so too hermit crab essays perform the deconstruction of the essay, which is at its core (just like gender) a set of conventions that simultaneously enable and constrict self-expression. Hermit crabs as a site for playful experimentation concealing sharp literary critique.

Bonus: Ocean Vuong, Seventh Circle of the Earth

For those curious to see how footnotes might contain a narrative, Vuong’s account of the immolation of two gay men in Texas offers a grim and potent example. As Vuong describes in his introduction to this poem, the very space on the page—the absence of text to which footnotes might be appended—is key to its meaning.

What moved me: The space that the footnotes leave behind, the breathlessness in it, the suspension of thought.

About the author

Jessica Wright

Jessica Wright is a historian and writer based in West Yorkshire. Her work has been published in journals such as Michigan Quarterly Review, Queerlings Magazine, Foglifter Journal, and Mslexia. Her first book,  The Care of the Brain in Early Christianity , came out with University of California Press in 2022.

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How to Write a Hermit Crab Essay

Saturday, february 2, 2019 • writing tips.

What is a Hermit Crab Essay?

How to construct a hermit crab essay.

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CRAFT: The Hermit Crab Essay: Forming a Humorous Take on Dark Memoir by Susan Mack

June 6, 2022.

Many of us feel challenged when trying to add humor to a darker memoir piece. Perhaps we don’t think of ourselves as funny, we don’t want to cheapen the depth of a traumatic experience with a formulaic or cheap joke, or we don’t think the experience was funny. We may worry humor is so subjective that our readers won’t get our jokes or won’t find them authentic and relatable.

The hermit crab essay offers an excellent opportunity to experiment with respectful humor as a tool to help readers engage with darker topics.

In The Psychology of Humor, an Integrative Approach , Rod Martin describes a longstanding philosophy of humor:

“the perception of incongruity is the crucial determinant of whether or not something is humorous: things that are funny are surprising, peculiar, unusual or different from what we normally expect.”

Martin goes on to argue that the greater the degree of incongruity, the more tension builds, and the greater the emotional release through humor.

By this definition, one can argue the hermit crab essay is inherently humorous. It purposely delivers content inside of an incongruous structure, just as hermit crabs must adopt external shells to protect their soft bodies. The contrast between form and content offers an opportunity for overt humor that in no way conflicts with the intensity of the subject matter.

Brenda Miller’s “We Regret to Inform You” is one of the better-known hermit crab essays. Inspired by publishers’ rejection letters, Miller writes a series of speculative letters for non-writing-related rejections throughout her life, beginning with “Dear Young Artist: Thank you for your attempt to draw a tree. We appreciate your efforts … but your smudges look nothing like a tree.” The essay then offers letters for teenage rejections: school dances, dance team, trying to act. Then it turns to deeper rejections: miscarriage, boyfriends, the role of stepmother. This last one shows a characteristic of the form, which, while humorous, allows for a deeper exploration of the reasons behind the rejections. Miller writes the following as one of the reasons why her application for stepmother was rejected:

“Though you have sacrificed your time and energy to support this family, it’s become clear that your desire to be a stepmother comes from some deep-seated wound in yourself, a wound you are trying to heal. We have enough to deal with — an absent mother, a frazzled father. We don’t need your traumas in the mix.”

This form allows Miller to use the children’s voice to tell us, in a few words, the real reason why the marriage doesn’t work. Including this heavily emotional description inside such a cold, rejection-letter format creates an incongruity that is humorous, insightful, and sad at the same time. If we laugh, we laugh in empathy with the narrator’s pain. Miller ends the series of rejections with one acceptance, titled “Dear New Dog Owner,” which provides not just contrast with the rejections but also a somewhat universal panacea for rejection: a dog. The incongruity of form allows a succinct exploration of larger rejection, including a full range of light and dark, funny and sad, all in the same essay.

Effective use of the hermit crab structure doesn’t have to be limited to standalone essays. In Pat Boone Fan Club , Sue Silverman uses the hermit crab form in one subsection of a larger essay about her high school rival’s suicide, while other sections have more conventional narrative structures. This section, titled “The Love Triangle as a Problem of High School Geometry,” is almost self-explanatory. Silverman uses the set, logical structure of math to try to explain the free-form rule-breaking challenge of a love triangle. The narrator’s difficulty with math serves as a metaphor for the difficulty of navigating the complex calculus of teenage love:

“But suppose this geometric proof of love is merely a postulate? For if Christopher smiles at Lynn then _______. I don’t want to fill in the blank. Memorize the following equation as if it’s hard evidence: Lynn hates me as much as I hate her. This hate = the amount we both love Christopher.”

The mathematical structure contrasts with the emotional complexities of human — particularly teenage — romance. It offers a sense of the sweet innocence of the teenage mind wrestling with the relatively new world of romance, along with the older writer’s understanding that this will never fit into a simple mathematical equation. This structure allows humor, sweetness, and empathy to exist in the same moment. Its placement immediately after the subsection introducing the rival’s suicide provides a welcome variety of emotional pacing. The few paragraphs of humorous description effectively support the intensity of the longer essay.

Many other authors use hermit crab techniques as humorous moments inside larger works. Jenny Lawson uses a one-sided conversation with her husband on Post-it notes and imaginary author talks to give alternate structures in Furiously Happy. Many authors include humorous lists in their work. There are endless options for playing with hermit crab form inside CNF. And with them, endless options for playing with contrast between form and content, title and subject matter, and even as-yet undiscovered humorous juxtapositions.

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Borrowed Forms, Borrowed Shells: The Hermit Crab Essay

Lately, I’ve been interested in what educators do to invite playfulness in the classroom.  When we create conditions for playful experimentation, we can lower the stakes for communicating about a serious topic.  In fact, we may lower an entire drawbridge, allowing students to enter into an imaginative space previously regarded as a formidable realm, where they can explore materials for arming themselves and disarming themselves, however they wish.

This type of safe space brings to mind other creatures who armor themselves.  Consider the hermit crab.  Born without protection for its soft, exposed abdomen, the hermit crab spends its life inhabiting empty shells abandoned by snails and other mollusks.  In honor of these perpetually shell-seeking creatures, Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola dubbed a particular form of lyric essay the “hermit crab” essay–a type of essay that appropriates an existing form.  Exploring material that is “soft, exposed, and tender,” Miller and Paola explain, a writer may “look elsewhere to find the form that will best contain it.”

Familiarizing students with the text structure of the borrowed forms builds confidence.  Instead of feeling like a writer meandering helplessly, the model text acts as an invitation to be playful, but within given parameters.

To help students weigh possibilities existing with borrowed forms, I made a list of familiar forms from which I sought mentor text examples.

Hermit Crab Essay Mentor Texts

• How-to Article: Lorrie Moore’s “How to Become a Writer”

In her debut story collection Self-Help , Moore included a series of “How-To” pieces, employing the the step-by step style used in how-to articles to narrate a writer’s journey in a delightfully idiosyncratic unfolding.  

The seminar doesn’t like this one either.  You suspect they are beginning to feel sorry for you.  They say: “you have to think about what is happening.  Where is the story here?”

Though the form of the essay sets the reader up to expect a clear, upward trajectory, we soon come to realize that each step offers insight into the frequent experience of emotional deflation that comes with receiving feedback on one’s writing.  Instead of offering a portrait of sure-footed success, Moore’s essay suggests the choice to become a writer serves up a different experience with inevitability: the realization that not writing would be more painful than fielding the frequent underwhelmed responses to her career choice.

• Rejection Letter: Brenda Miller’s “We Regret To Inform You”

In her 2015 essay published in Brevity Magazine , Miller offers a series of rejection letters, adopting the voice of detachment that is so representative of this type of correspondence:

Dear Young Artist:

Thank you for your attempt to draw a tree.  We appreciate your efforts, especially the way you sat patiently on the sidewalk, gazing at that tree for an hour before setting pen to paper, the many quick strokes of charcoal executed with enthusiasm .

The letters are dated and sequenced for maximum effect, beginning with humorous addresses to her younger selves that elicit chuckles, which make way for letters that divulge more serious, heartrending topics.  Somehow, though, the detached tone of the letters sustain a humorous thread, perhaps arising from a voice steadfastly devoid of emotion.  The form of the rejection letter becomes an experimental playground where a writer can engage in deadpan confession.

• Real Estate Ad

My students love seeing how I approach the task I assign to them, so I created a hermit crab essay with a decidedly meta bent: I made a mock real estate ad directed towards a hermit crab seeking a new home.  I had come across a disturbing Smithsonian article describing how hermit crabs are using trash as shells, painting a sobering picture of how human trash disposal is transforming the natural world.

The compact nature of the real estate ad – you want to capture the reader’s attention quickly – lends itself to bubbly hyperbole that in this case both reveals and conceals the devastation posed by the tiny toxic particles introduced to these organisms’ bodies through degrading plastic.  Tragically, many hermit crabs who adopt these artificial homes as protective havens find themselves unable to escape them and starve to death.  Much like Miller’s borrowed form, the mock real estate ad demonstrates how a serious topic can be explored in the guise of playfulness.

How do you combine student writing and playfulness? What other forms can students explore with the hermit crab essay?   Share your reflections in the comments below or find me on Twitter @dispatches_b222 .

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contemporary haibun online

promoting and celebrating English-language haibun, tanka prose, and haiga

Rich Youmans

Haibun & the Hermit Crab

“borrowing” prose forms.

Photo by dan wilding on Unsplash

Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola’s Tell it Slant: Creating, Refining, and Publishing Creative Nonfiction offers useful guidance for doing exactly what its subtitle proclaims. Among the narrative structures it explores is one for which the authors invented their own term: the hermit crab essay.

They explain that, just as the little crustacean protects its exposed and vulnerable abdomen with the “borrowed” shells of others, the hermit crab essay “deals with material that seems born without its own carapace—material that’s soft, exposed, and tender, and must look elsewhere to find the form that will best contain it.” By appropriating a form’s inherent attributes, that material gains strength to deliver a powerful message.

The choices for these “shells” abound. In a craft essay she wrote for the online journal Brevity , Miller described how she begins hermit-crab classes by brainstorming the various forms that the students can adopt. She listed a few examples—a “to-do” list, a field guide, a recipe, the rejection letter—to which could be added many more: personal ads, game instructions, resumes, assembly directions, crossword puzzle clues, exams. . . . In “The Professor of Longing,” Jill Talbot exposes “the person behind the professor” through a very personal course description. In “ Your Personal Prescription Information ,” Sue William Silverman uses the typical directions/cautions found on prescription labels to explore love and infidelity with tenderness and dark humor. And Gwendolyn Wallace challenges racism and racial stereotypes through a math test (complete with graphs) in “Math 1619,” an essay found in both Tell It Slant and The Shell Game: Writers Play with Borrowed Forms by Kim Adrian (University of Nebraska Press, 2018) .

The hermit-crab form has also found its way into haibun. As writers continue to test the limits of haibun prose, many have moved beyond the standard paragraph format and have “borrowed shells” to present their messages. However, this is not a random process. As Miller and Paolo note, the form chosen must be one that will “best contain” the topic at hand; more than just offering an arresting format, it must imbue the narrative with its own inherent attributes, to create a resonance unavailable through standard blocks of prose.

In “Journal Entry / January 1,” Roberta Beary takes as her form a list of resolutions—the quintessential “to-do” list that, all too often, becomes a litany of failures.

Journal Entry / January 1

In this case, the 10 resolutions revolve around learning (or re-learning) Italian. Beary’s to-do list becomes an action plan that humorously shows the ambitious (some might say overly ambitious) nature of many New Year’s resolutions. And here’s where making this a haibun makes all the difference: to this list of exhausting to-dos, Beary adds a tender haiku that returns to the idea of the new year as a time of hope and aspiration and possibility.

In his e-book Tick Tock (which was recently honored with a Merit Book Award from the Haiku Society of America), Lew Watts includes a haibun that adopts a different form: the telegram.

Drilled into a shallow gas pocket. STOP. Lost control. STOP. One dead, seventeen missing. STOP. Body unidentifiable. STOP.

The form is perfect for capturing the suddenness of the episode, the fragmented way in which most disasters become understood and are so often communicated, their trauma almost unbearable. The repetition of STOP—the feature of a telegram that adds so much emotional resonance to this piece—percusses throughout the message like a hammering fist: an act of denial, anger, pleading. The placement of the final STOP incorporates the haiku (about a survivor’s attempts to deal with the trauma) into the telegram, and that last plea adds another of layer of emotional depth to the poem.

One of the more unusual (and powerful) hermit-crab haibun I’ve seen is “Glint” by Renée Owen. First published in Frogpond 35:1 (Winter 2012),  the haibun takes the form of a dictionary entry in which the “definitions” build the narrative:

glint (glint)—n. 1. the luster of sun in the front parlor window as it streams across grandma’s bursting with blue hydrangeas. 2. a tiny sparkle off a dime peeking from the Virginian dirt in tin can alley. 3. the gleaming brightness in my small eyes as she places the coin on the shopkeeper’s rusty red cooler for my coca-cola. 4. the trace of burnish left on grandpa’s rusted tools, row after row in the dirt-floored workshop beneath their house. —v. 5. morning light strikes the dint in the gold pocket watch dangling from a chain on cousin’s pants. 6. the naked bathroom bulb glares atop his white sailor’s cap, reflecting in the gun he holds. 7. beams glance off the mirror, as with one fluid motion, he places the barrel against his Old Spiced temple.

By writing this as a dictionary entry, Owen is able to add layers of detail based on one word, “glint,” and its various connotations. The first few “meanings,” in which the word is presented as a noun, create the narrative’s foundation: memories from a rural life, its small comforts and joys. The definitions describe “glint” in positive terms—luster, sparkle, brightness, burnish.

The shift to “glint” as verb also shifts the setting and the mood: we’re now inside a house where morning light “strikes” and a bathroom bulb “glares.” Just as verbs indicate action, so too do these definitions. They aren’t about static memories; something is about to happen. By the final definition, as beams glance off the bathroom mirror, the reader can also see the glint in the gun barrel, perhaps the glint of desperation in the cousin’s eyes as he places the gun to his temple. That glint then turns to starlight in the haiku, the first line of which reflects the cousin’s final countdown to “stillness.”

The dictionary form not only enables Owen to parse out the images and actions so that they slowly accumulate to their chilling conclusion, but also adds another layer itself: after a suicide, don’t we always wonder why , and ask what meaning lay behind the act? What better form to convey this than a dictionary?

These are just a few examples of the many “shells” that haibun writers can appropriate as containers for their messages. (If you have more, list them in the Comments section below.) Not only do these borrowed forms add power to a narrative, they also can provide inspiration. By taking on the shell’s constraints, haibun writers must come at their subjects in different ways: to sneak up from behind, parachute down, or otherwise approach them “slant.” They must learn to express themselves anew—and in so doing, they not only invigorate their own writing, but also expand the definition of what a haibun can be.

So. . . what shell would you like to inhabit for a while?

About the Author

Rich Youmans  lives on Cape Cod with his wife, Alice. His latest chapbook,  Head-On: Haibun Stories , was published by Red Bird Chapbooks in 2018.

10 thoughts on “<strong>Haibun & the Hermit Crab</strong>, by Rich Youmans”

This is a challenge . Other forms that spring to mind : estate agent’s blurb, school report, leaflet accompanying medication.

I’m toying with a list I made of all the placenames on the map of the area encompassed by the 2km radius travel limit imposed by our government during the recent lockdown.

Maybe the ‘hermit crab’ is a way to use them.

A recipe might make a good shell. Great food for thought, Rich, although I’m not sure about the editibility of herit crabs. 😉

Possible Hermit Crab Shells for Haibunists and Their Haibun to Inhabit

1. Research paper’s structured abstract (i.e., introduction, objectives, methods, results, conclusion) summarizing an analysis of a personal, unsolvable problem requiring the always tagged-on “need for further research.”

2. A “Miss Lonelyhearts,” Ann Landers, or Erma Bombeck type of letter seeking advice for a somewhat embarrassing personal problem or situation accompanied by a judicious, entertaining, yet warm-hearted reply.

3. Employment advertisement (i.e., company description, position, location, application process) written by a childless couple seeking a child, a petless person seeking a pet, or a lifeless person seeking a life (also see #8).

4. “Situation wanted” advertisement for a true caregiver, someone to pick up the pieces.

5. U.S. Post Office “Most Wanted” poster for a parent, sibling, spouse, child, or friend.

6. “Wanted to sell” item, but instead of house, a car, or a bicycle, perhaps a hang-up, a problem, or a sin, even one of the seven deadly ones (i.e., pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth).

7. Miniature, one-paragraph obituary notice written as a movie review by a harsh and shallow critic.

8. Soliloquy from the grave, carrying on the tradition of the voices from Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology and the epigrams and epitaphs in The Greek Anthology.

9. A dramatis personae listing in which the play’s “main characters” are aspects of a single individual’s personality.

10. One-sentence or one-paragraph synopses of one life’s dramatic arc, from the exposition, rising action, climax, return or fall, to the eventual catastrophe or lack of one.

11. Tongue-in-cheek, imperfect prayers, as in David Head’s He Sent Leanness (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1959): “Help me to be still and know that I am good” (page 35), “May I fulfill all the duties that I see, but do not let me see too many” (page 37), “May I always have someone I can help, for the sake of my self-esteem” (page 42), and “Lord, the thought of being a ghost haunts me” (page 47).

12. Self-description as a bird, listing sightings, physical description, songs and calls, range, migration, conservation status, discussion, habitat, feeding behavior, diet, nesting, and eggs (don’t forget the eggs).

13. Itemization of a relationship as a “rap sheet,” listing types of crimes, arrests, prosecutions, charges, convictions, dismissals, and suspensions (paroles and recidivisms are optional).

14. Reverse “Top 10 list” (pace David Letterman) describing pet peeves, names of pets owned and loved from birth to present, or favorite metaphors for something abstract, as in George Herbert’s poem that starts with “prayer the church’s banquet, angel’s age” and ends with “the land of spices, something understood.”

15. A day-in-the-life “Trending,” “Top Stories,” and “Best of News” paragraph snippets for an individual’s world rather than for the world itself.

16. Allegorical Greyhound Lines bus itinerary for a road trip used as a metaphor for a life’s journey, as in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress or C. S. Lewis’s The Pilgrim’s Regress.

17. List of 17 possible hermit crab shells for haibunists and their haibun to inhabit, minus the obligatory haiku.

Enlightening read, and Richard Straw, thank you for the additional ideas–sounds like a workshop in the making!

Wow! This is an interesting essay, thanks so much for sharing these various shells with us.

Loved the array of ideas this article has triggered. I will gladly extend and share this with other teachers teaching writing. Thanks for this article.

Wow! I loved all the different ideas. So inspiring! Now what shell would I choose?

A crazy reporter’s rant on television about a story which has lost its relevance.

Thanks for the ideas above. My twopence above. Have a safe and food day!

Good stuff to bear in mind. Indeed. A thousand doorways there are, it seems, into this wonderful form. Thanks for shedding light on the possibilities.

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The Shell Game: Writers Play with Borrowed Forms

The Shell Game: Writers Play with Borrowed Forms Edited and with an introduction by Kim Adrian Foreword by Brenda Miller Postscript by Cheyenne Nimes 276 pages, paperback, $24.95 University of Nebraska Press April, 2018

Shell Games

In the forward, Brenda Miller outlines the basis of The Shell Game by describing a hermit crab:

A hermit crab is a strange animal, born without the armor to protect its soft, exposed abdomen. And so it spends its life occupying the empty, often beautiful, shells left by snails or other mollusks. It reanimates these shells, making of them a strange new hybrid creature.

As a result, a “hermit crab essay” is an essay that occupies an alternative form, which makes manifest what is vulnerable through a structure that is wholly unique and hybrid in nature. The Shell Game does not disappoint: essayists adopt—or is it adapt?—an online dating profile, a Rubik’s Cube, crossword puzzle clues, captions, alphabetical lists, multiple choice tests, rejection letters among other “shells” to demonstrate the inextricable link between form and content.

More specifically, the essays reveal how prompts, fill-in-the-blanks, and other preformed structures can push or nudge writers into discovering entirely new meanings and the ways in which creation emerges from particular contexts. In “Ok, Cupid,” Sarah McColl writes, “Built-in constraints have interesting effects,” which is what we see as she composes a personal essay through answering the questions commonly asked on online dating profiles. The interesting effects continue in “Rubik’s Cube, Six Twisted Paragraphs,” wherein Kathryn A. Kopple melds the history of the Rubik’s Cube and Cubism with the story of her father. She creates the form of the Rubik’s Cube by writing in six blocks of square text that work at interlocking the two threads in more and more complex ways as the essay progresses.

Yet what makes these essays so compelling, however, is not only that they comply with their chosen form but also that they include moments where they transgress. For example, the theme of fatherhood continues in Dinty W. Moore’s “Son of Mr. Green Jeans: An Essay on Fatherhood, Alphabetically Arranged,” which employs alphabetical entries and an objective tone usually found in encyclopedias. But by the letter “I,” the objective, third-person breaks down and begins to reveal a first-person account of the speaker’s relationship with his father. Moreover, the satisfaction of “We Regret to Inform You” by Brenda Miller comes at the end when a series of life events composed as rejection letters finally resolve into an acceptance (of self).

While I have highlighted only a few essays in the anthology, there are so many others that are sure to catch your eye. Footnotes, science logs, parables, and government documents expand and collapse as the various essayists use form to construct (and reconstruct) meaning. Ultimately, The Shell Game may serve to expand what readers may think of when they think of the essay. Among the grocery lists and Post-It notes, comic sketches and sermons, and the other ephemera of our everyday lives, essayistic elements exist—searching for their shells.

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© 2018 Columbia College Chicago

| Department of English and Creative Writing

Essays in Strange Forms and Peculiar Places: ‘The Shell Game’

The term “hermit crab essay,” coined in 2003 by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola in their book  Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction , refers to essays that take the form of something un-essay-like—such as a recipe, how-to manual, or marriage license—and use this form to tell a story or explore a topic.

These essays, like the creatures they’re named after, borrow the structures and forms they inhabit. And these borrowed homes, in turn, protect the soft, vulnerable bodies of the crabs within. As Miller and Paola write in their original description of the genre:

This kind of essay appropriates other forms as an outer covering to protect its soft, vulnerable underbelly. It’s an essay that deals with material that seems to have been born without its own carapace—material that’s soft, exposed, and tender and must look elsewhere to find the form that will best contain it.

Hermit crab essays are a fascinating genre, one that I’m drawn to as both a reader and a writer. There’s something about them that represents the spirit of our era—with our infinite distractibility and our distrust of meta-narratives. They capture, perhaps, the inability of traditional storytelling to tell our most traumatic, fragmented, and complex stories—and our longing for structures that can.

Hermit crab essays de-normalize our sense of genre, helping us to see the way that forms and screens, questionnaires and interviews all shape knowledge as much as they convey it. For essays like these, message is always, at least in part, the medium.

Miller says in her foreword to The Shell Game that “with every iteration, both the hermit crab creature and the hermit crab essay become more deeply understood, and the possibilities for the form grow by the day.” And it is indeed a form that’s constantly growing and expanding. As long as there are new forms and structures created in the world, there are new possibilities for hermit crab essays.

Kim Adrian’s introduction to the volume is itself a hermit crab essay. Subtitled “A Natural History of the North American Hermit Crab Essay,” the introduction takes the form of a field guide about hermit crab essays, as if they were living creatures. In a section called “Number of Species,” for instance, she says that the family is “theoretically infinite, realistically somewhere in the thousands. Maybe tens of. Some of the more conspicuous include: grocery lists; how-to instructions; job applications; syllabi and other academic outlines; recipes; obituaries; liner notes; contributors’ notes; chronologies of all orders; abecedarians of all types; hierarchies of every description; want ads; game instructions,” along with dozens of other examples. In other words, the forms that hermit crab essays can take are as endless and ever-changing as human culture itself.

Adrian raises in her introduction the possibility that hermit crab essays could “be a self-limiting phenomenon: a somewhat charming blip of literary trendiness.” Time will tell, she says, but it’s also possible:

…that instead of disappearing like a spent trend, the hermit crab essay may yet spawn an entire new breed of essays—essays we can’t even imagine from here, essays that refuse to draw a line between fact and fiction, that refuse even to acknowledge such a line, and that throw on disguises of every description…in order to more fully inhabit some internal truth and in this way do what the best specimens of the noble order Exagium have always done: get to something real.

It’s interesting to note, as she says, that one of the things these essays do is to “refuse to draw a line between fact and fiction.” Many hermit crab essays are a strange hybrid between fact and fiction, calling attention to their constructedness and their made-up qualities even as they presumably tell “true” stories and are rooted in actual experiences. It’s difficult to consider them strictly nonfiction, since they are themselves inventions. When an essay in this volume takes the form of a legal document or a marriage license, after all, it’s pretending to be those things in order to tell a deeper story, or, as Adrian says, to “get to something real.”

It’s no accident, I think, that this form is gaining popularity precisely at a moment in American culture when the distinctions between fact and fiction are becoming increasingly blurry. That’s not to say that hermit crab essays don’t teach us to think critically about that blurriness. Rather, they do just the opposite: They call attention to the ways that cultural forms and expectations create reality. They make us see something about the forms and the stories they embody, helping us to understand how the forms of our culture both shape and limit our understanding of the world.

The essays in this volume cross a lot of territory and, as would be expected, take many forms. One of my favorites is “Solving My Way to Grandma” by Laurie Easter . It takes the form of a crossword puzzle in order to tell the story of the narrator’s coming to terms with becoming a grandmother. Since I love word puzzles, I worked on the puzzle as I read the essay, which was composed of small snippets of story turned into clues. Here, for instance, is 1 Across: “‘Mom, I have something to tell you. You might want to sit down.’ When my daughter said this, my first thought was Uh-oh, who died? Not Oh my god, she’s pregnant. (Expect the _______).”

Solving the puzzle while reading the essay lets the reader experience the narrator’s own process of puzzle-solving about her life. It’s a moving essay that works especially well because the form and the content are so well-matched. Reading this essay is a visceral experience in puzzle-solving.

The collection is full of similarly surprising and delightful essays. Sarah McColl ’s “Ok, Cupid,” for instance, uses the form of a dating profile for self-revelation, with the narrator answering questions like “What I’m doing with my life” with elaborate and seemingly tangential answers that actually become more truthful than a real dating profile ever could.

Brenda Miller’s “We Regret to Inform You” is a brilliant collection of imagined rejection letters from art teachers, dance teams, and would-be boyfriends and husbands. The essay ends, finally, with an acceptance letter from a pet rescue, congratulating her on the adoption of her new dog—a letter that comes in stark and moving contrast to the years of rejection.

The essays in this collection bring with them a sense of hope about literature and its capacity for evolution and change. In Tell It Slant , Miller and Paola tell those interested in writing hermit crab essays to look around and see what’s out there: “The world is brimming with forms that await transformation. See how the world constantly orders itself in structures that can be shrewdly turned to your own purposes.”

In a postscript to The Shell Game , there’s an eight-page list by Cheyenne Nimes of many possible forms for hermit crab essays, from game show transcripts to eBay ads. I couldn’t help reading this as a list of writing prompts, circling some that I’d like to try. It’s a fitting way to end a volume that is as much an inspiration for other writers as it is a definitive collection of a constantly evolving genre.

Ultimately, maybe it’s this promise of transformation and adaptation that makes hermit crab essays so appealing. They encourage us to move forward, and they show us how many different paths we might take.

Vivian Wagner lives in New Concord, Ohio, where she teaches English at Muskingum University. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Creative Nonfiction, Slice, and many other publications, and she’s the author of Fiddle: One Woman, Four Strings, and 8,000 Miles of Music (Citadel-Kensington), The Village (Kelsay Books), and Making (Origami Poems Project). Visit her website at www.vivianwagner.net .

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Creative Writing

The hermit crab essay.

Like hermit crabs finding different vessels to use as shells, essayists can repurpose different forms to tell their stories. In this class, we’ll look at unique hermit crab essays in the form of rejection letters, lists, quizzes and more, and discuss how to choose the best form to suit your essay. We’ll also experiment with writing our own hermit crab essays and discuss them in class.

All students must be 18 years of age or older. 

Sorry, but there are no available courses being offered this semester.

The Essay as Bouquet

"Hermit crab" essays can take many forms, both natural and not

Ambrose Bierce, the American editorialist and journalist, wrote in his 1909 craft book, Write It Right , that “good writing” is “clear thinking made visible,” an idea that has been repeated and adapted by countless writers over the past century. My own addition would be to add that the act of lyric essay writing not only makes thoughts visible but also institutes order and layers meaning when it is not always immediately apparent. And although ideas may begin free-form or as stream of consciousness, on the page or screen, we make the jump from internal to external. We craft them into a form, whether chronological or otherwise. One such approach to form is the “hermit crab” essay, so named by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola in their craft book Tell It Slant . Miller later defined it in an article for Brevity as “adopt[ing] already existing forms as the container for the writing at hand, such as the essay in the form of a ‘to-do’ list, or a field guide, or a recipe.” This approach creates meaning by juxtaposing the personal story with its imposed “container,” allowing the more traditional narrative to be in conversation with our personal, cultural, and/or scientific assumptions and understandings of the chosen form.

“Hermit crabs,” Miller explains, “are creatures born without their own shells to protect them; they need to find empty shells to inhabit (or sometimes not so empty; in the years since I’ve begun using the hermit crab as my metaphor, I’ve learned they can be quite vicious, evicting the shell’s rightful inhabitant by force).” Ironically, however, most containers that writers find are of the nonorganic variety: a shopping list, a course syllabus—not unlike the hermit crab who makes its home inside a bottle cap. Here, we will look at a few examples that do employ natural forms as a container, encouraging a conversation between the human-made and the natural world.

Chelsea Biondolillo’s “On Shells” from Essay Daily is, at first glance, a fragmented essay that alternates between the narratives of the author learning to beachcomb as a child, the author becoming a writer and teacher, and the background on shell collectors. At first, it appears the essay resists form when our author implies she didn’t initially embrace the imposed form of a hermit crab essay because it felt contrived. But as we move through the essay, the fragments take on their own form: that of shell collecting and of nature itself. Biondolillo tells us at the end that she has learned that writing “practice is inefficient by design. Collect as many tools and forms and voices and structures as you can so that you are as well-equipped as possible when you sit down to work.” So is beachcombing a practice of collecting the best of random bits, your own practice of creating order. She says she has learned not to be as “worried about the prize at the end of the page” as she once was; every essay we read and write will have a literal end, but there will also never be an end. The essay is about the journey, the collection of random bits, and what the resulting collection means when the pieces are looked at as a whole. And so Biondolillo’s imposed form as an act of shell collecting, reinforced by the small pictures of shells on the page between each fragment, helps illustrate that while nature can be random, as we find meaning in nature, so we also find that this randomness can—and does—forge its own form.

Yet one may also rightfully argue that nature is not entirely random, but has developed clear and consistent taxonomies, cycles, and behaviors. In Jennifer Lunden’s “The Butterfly Effect” (first published in this magazine), we learn about the life cycle of butterflies in a series of encyclopedia-like entries that also serve as the form to tell the story of the author’s own connection to butterflies, beginning in adolescence. Yet, in the early sections, like “Metamorphosis,” “Migration,” and “Habitat,” we learn as much about how these terms apply to our author’s own life as to the butterflies she is traveling, in this essay, to see.

And then our narrative—and our encyclopedic structure—spins outward. We learn about “The Butterfly Lady,” who found healing amongst the butterflies in California. The threads of these three parallel stories—the author’s, the Butterfly Lady’s, and that of the butterflies themselves—woven together form a single whole, a container. Is the container the form of the scientific encyclopedia entry? If so, we can reflect on what this says about humans imposing form on nature; after all, it is we who insist on categorization, on creating a narrative out of the sometimes disparate layers of a natural phenomenon. Or is our container the cocoon that is spun outward, protecting the chrysalis as it transforms? I would argue it is both: our encyclopedia headers look outward to “Monsanto” and “Global Warming,” and how these affect the environment not only of the butterfly but also of the author, and, in fact, of all humans. This form—or, one might argue, this dual form—reflects human imposition on nature as well as the inverse: how we define nature, yes, but also how our decisions affect it. The repetition of the headers “Migration” and “Habitat” also creates a cyclical movement often at odds with human written narration, though it is frequently seen in nature: in seasons, metamorphosis, life and death. As these threads diverge and converge, we also see wildness and humanity doing the same, ending with our word for a natural occurrence—susurrus—which would exist whether humans witnessed and named it or not.

Finally, Julie Marie Wade’s “Bouquet,” originally published in Third Coast and reprinted in her book Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures , is itself a bouquet that pairs the name, horticultural descriptions, growing tendencies, and cultural relevance of different kinds of flowers with scenes or reflections. The personal reflects the natural, both through the flowers’ innate tendencies and the symbolism culture imposes on them. For example, a brief explanation of why the long-lasting cornflower is known as “bachelor’s button” is paired with the story of a relationship as well as Wade’s struggle to accept her own sexual identity. What makes the bouquet an appropriate container is the interplay of the natural characteristics of each flower—those that humans cannot control—with the cultural import we have given many of these flowers, as well as the symbolism of the bouquet as an object. The bouquet is a human form made of nature—a collection of (in this case) disparate flowers, cut and contained and most often given as a gesture of love. A bouquet, too, is a sum of its parts. Each flower can and does exist on its own in the wild, but in relation to others in our human-made form, each plays a particular role. Here is the author’s literary bouquet: a collection of the personal blooms that make up the story she is telling—a bouquet the reader believes, by the end of reading, to be a gift to her beloved. As in both Biondolillo’s and Lunden’s essays, there is always the tension of seeing a natural form in its native habitat—a shell, a butterfly, a flower—and the human manipulation of it.

Can we ever not see nature through the lens of our humanness?

As I began my own investigation into nature-influenced hermit crab essays, I thought I would find numerous essays that used the infinite unblemished forms found in our natural world as a perfect metaphor and container for our very human and imperfect stories. But I found it challenging to unearth many examples of nature-as-form, and those I did find built upon the interplay of the natural world and human influence. Perhaps this only makes sense: can we ever not see nature through the lens of our humanness, especially as we strive to use it as a container to help make sense of our own stories and experiences?

Perhaps Biondolillo best expresses the essence of what a hermit crab essay is: “Acuity to see the unbroken curve of aperture against all of the chips and shards the sea has thrown up, to see the unblemished whorl, the striations in deep relief among the smooth nubs of wood, the distracting pebbles of glass, the wet strings and sheets of seaweed, already rotting in the first light of morning.” At first reading, I interpreted this to be an appreciation of nature and an effort to emulate its “unbroken curve” and “unblemished whorl” in one’s writing. But maybe that’s not the whole story. The hermit crab essay as inspired by nature can be formed from the broken “chips and shards” and the “distracting pebbles of glass.” Are these imperfect bits manmade or from nature? And does it matter? They are all part of the world in which we live: nature influenced by humans and humans inspired by nature—and all of us if not rotting, then certainly evolving in each new morning’s light.

The Premise

7 | Borrowed Forms in Nonfiction

A few pointers on the "hermit crab" essay.

A few years ago, I edited an anthology called The Shell Game: Writers Play with Borrowed Forms , a collection of thirty-two “hermit crab essays” (University of Nebraska Press, 2018). What’s a hermit crab essay? you may ask. It’s an essay that, like its namesake, borrows its structure from elsewhere. For example, a hermit crab essay might look like an elaborate grocery list with brief slice-of-life sketches following each food item. Or it might look like a doctor’s prescription pad with information not only about the medications themselves, but also short narratives that, taken together, tell the story of a chronic illness.

Borrowed forms have been around since forever with fiction (think of epistolary novels). But in nonfiction they’re a fairly new development. To borrow a form for use in an essay is to creatively push the limits of nonfiction to the brink—but not breach those limits. The reader must remain confident you’re still talking about reality. For example, if a hermit crab essay uses the first person, the narrator will be identical with the author. That said, one of the great gifts of the hermit crab essay is how it allows for very personal stories to be told in the second or third person, or simply as a presentation of information alone. There’s a gorgeous essay in The Shell Game by Ingrid Jendrzejewski, called “#miscarriage.exe,” that tells the story of the author’s miscarriage in the form of computer script. “#miscarriage.exe” is a deeply personal essay, full of intimate details that anchor it to the author’s real life, but there’s nary a personal pronoun in the entire thing.

I’ve written a number of hermit crab essays over the years as well as two book-length works of nonfiction that use borrowed forms, and, for me, much of the appeal of working this way has to do with the constraints a borrowed form places on the work. Because—paradoxically—once you settle on those constraints, a great sense of possibility and movement opens up within them. In short, writing with borrowed forms can often feel like a form of play.

One of the most popular essays in The Shell Game was written by an 18-year-old high school student named Gwendolyn Wallace. It’s called “Math 1619,” and it’s an essay about being a black girl at a mostly white high school in a mostly white town. Here’s an short excerpt (problem number “3” on the “test”):

Below is a graph of the black girl’s pulse when she sees the blond-haired woman slowly approach her from behind as she’s buying a Mother’s Day card. This is her first time getting followed in a store. The black girl is in a J.Crew sweater and jeans. The girl remembers to take her hands out of her pockets and slow her breathing. She softens any hardness in her eyes anyone could claim to see. The black girl smiles. The adjacent graph shows how close the saleswoman is getting to her over time. Find the speed of the girl’s pulse when the saleswoman is ten feet away from her.

The form of a successful hermit crab essay works synergistically with its content. One way a well-chosen form contributes to this synergy is by giving the reader an enormous amount of contextual information right off the bat. In “Math 1619” we understand almost immediately that we’re reading about a young, academically engaged black high school student, a girl, who’s grappling not only with the legacy of slavery in the broadest sense (as signaled by the title), but with the much smaller scale, frustrating and often scary racial aspects of authority and power as they show up again and again in her daily life. “Math 1619” is extremely short—only three printed pages. But because the form itself does so much heavy lifting, this brief essay feels big and important.

If you’re curious to try your hand at a hermit crab essay, you might want to keep these tips in mind:

Make your form easily recognizable—otherwise you’ll just baffle your reader. For example, if in your work life you regularly use some kind of specialized form, it may have a lot of personal significance to you, and therefore be a tempting form to borrow, but because it’s specialized, your reader won’t know what it is (unless, of course, you do a lot of explanatory work within the essay itself—which is possible; but as a general rule, it’s best to stick with broadly recognizable forms).

A well chosen form will amplify or echo the central theme or subject of the essay. Think about how the prescription pad example works on a metaphorical level in an essay about chronic illness.

The more rigid the form is, the more it will guide the shape of the essay itself. I once wrote an essay called “Knitting 101” in which I laid out the basic instructions for knitting as an itemized list of twelve pointers for new knitters (e.g. “Materials,” “Anatomy of a Knit Stitch,” “Casting On,” et cetera). Once I’d done that, the essay (which was really about family and domesticity) practically wrote itself because I had such a simple, solid structure, ready to go.

Because of this tendency for borrowed forms to provide fairly rigid structures, a borrowed-form essay can be a terrific way to write about topics that might otherwise seem too small and insignificant—or, conversely, too large and amorphous—or simply too personal and vulnerable to write about in more conventional ways.

Some people like to find an interesting form to work with first; then they seek out an appropriate subject for it. I generally work the opposite way, finding my subject first—something that’s really pressing at me (but that for some reason I find difficult to write about)—before hunting around for an appropriate form. If you want to give this kind of essay a whirl, try both approaches, and see which one works best for you.

If you’re intrigued by hermit crab essays, I hope you find these tips helpful. If you’d like more where this came from, I’m offering a four-hour craft workshop on Saturday, May 21 that will focus on the borrowed form essay. You can read more about the class and register for it here.

Writing the Hermit Crab Essay

As always, thank you for your interest in this newsletter. Please feel free to share it with other writers in your life.

Best of luck finding some interesing shells,

Ready for more?

The Hermit Crab Essay

In progress, 6:00 - 8:00pm ct, instructor:, jennifer chesak, the porch house at 2811 dogwood pl., nashville, 37204, for members, for non-members.

Hermit crabs frequently change shells. Our writing can too, giving us a new structure—just for fun or when we feel stuck. A hermit crab essay uses the existing shell of a different form of the written word, such as a recipe, a research paper outline, a word math problem, footnotes or endnotes, an open letter, and more. In this workshop, we'll explore impactful and fun hermit crab essays, brainstorm "shells" for our writing, and craft a hermit crab essay.

Jennifer Chesak is the author of The Psilocybin Handbook for Women . She is an award-winning freelance science and medical journalist, editor, and fact-checker, and her work has has appeared in several national publications, including the Washington Post. Chesak earned her master of science in journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill. She currently teaches in the journalism and publishing programs at Belmont University, leads various workshops at the The Porch, and serves as the managing editor for the literary magazine SHIFT. Find her work at jenniferchesak.com and follow her on socials @jenchesak.

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Advanced Essay Writing: The Hermit Crab Essay

Have you ever read a nonfiction essay written in letters, lists, or emails? If you answered yes, you have read a hermit crab essay. The hermit crab essay is a nonfiction essay in which the writer adopts an existing form to contain their writing, such as recipes, to do lists, and/or field guides. In this six-week course, you will read through examples of hermit crab essays and discuss their meaning, construction, and mechanics. Through a series of writing exercises and peer workshops, you will produce your own hermit crab essay that uses unexpected forms to create unique writing.

Class Details

‍ Genre : Nonfiction ‍ Level : Advanced ‍ Format : Craft and generative workshop with writing outside of class and peer feedback. ‍ Location : This class takes place remotely online via Zoom. ‍ Size : Limited to 12 participants (including scholarships). ‍ Suggested Sequence : Follow this class with a craft and/or generative nonfiction workshop, a feedback course, or a publishing course. ‍ Scholarships : Two scholarship spots are available for this class for writers in Northeast Ohio. Apply by December 1. ‍ Cancellations & Refunds : Cancel at least 48 hours in advance of the first class meeting to receive a full refund. Email [email protected].

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Negesti Kaudo is a Midwestern essayist who holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from Columbia College Chicago. She is the author of Ripe: Essays and the youngest winner of the Ohioana Library Association's Walter Rumsey Marvin grant (2015) for unpublished writers under 30.

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Hermit Crab Essay

On Monday some of us attended a presentation by Randon Billings Noble, a candidate for teaching Creative Non Fiction at Rowan.

She read an example of what she referred to as a Hermit Crab essay.

In nature a Hermit Crab uses shells discarded by the sea creatures, for example you might find a hermit crab living in an old oyster shell.

I liked this approach to writing a personal essay and I think you will too.

The approach is quite simple.

Like a hermit crab you borrow the format of another piece writing––probably a non-creative form––and build your essay using that type wof structure.

This seems to work best when the essay is deeply personal––almost to the point of being confessional––and the format is highly prosaic (‘prosaic’ is the opposite to poetic, and means dry, dull, and boring), thus giving the maximum tension between to the two forms.

Our first task is to brainstorm some of the possible formats we could use.

Reseach Paper

Project Proposal

Instruction Manual

Lesson Plan (Hah!)

Business Letter

Real Estate Flyer

For Sale Notice

Event Poster

Greeting Card (or a series of greeting cards)

Description of a work of art (painting, piece of music, sculpture)

Museum, Brochure.

There are many other formats, but the next step is to look at the potential of some of them, and the greatest potential probably lies with the ones you’re most familiar with. For example, I trained as an artist, so the idea of viewing a scene from my life as a classical painting in a museum appeals to me––just because I spend a lot of time in museums.

Sylvia Plath did this too.

If you’ve recently been trying to buy or sell something on ebay or craigslist you might do the sales blurb.

At this point it’s good to ask ourselves why we’re doing this.

Yes, it could be fun, and fun makes good writing and reading, but in creative non-fiction we’re trying to go deeper.

What we are achieving here has been referred to as getting ‘out of our own way.’

In other words, we know what we want to write about, but this exercise is going to force us to reconsider how we’re going to write about it, and open ourselves up to the unexpected.

Do we really want to write about lost love as maudlin first person account? Would that really get the point across? Could it be more effective if the account was written as a set of instructions.

Here are some examples from essayist Brenda Miller:

Rejection Letter  

April 12, 1970

Dear Young Artist:

Thank you for your attempt to draw a tree. We appreciate your efforts, especially the way you sat patiently on the sidewalk, gazing at that tree for an hour before setting pen to paper, the many quick strokes of charcoal executed with enthusiasm. But your drawing looks nothing like a tree. In fact, the smudges look like nothing at all, and your own pleasure and pride in said drawing are not enough to redeem it. We are pleased to offer you remedial training in the arts, but we cannot accept your “drawing” for display.

With regret and best wishes,

The Art Class

Andasol Avenue Elementary School

October 13, 1975

Dear 10th Grader:

Thank you for your application to be a girlfriend to one of the star players on the championship basketball team. As you can imagine, we have received hundreds of similar requests and so cannot possibly respond personally to every one. We regret to inform you that you have not been chosen for one of the coveted positions, but we do invite you to continue hanging around the lockers, acting as if you belong there. This selfless act serves the team members as they practice the art of ignoring lovesick girls.

The Granada Hills Highlanders

P.S: Though your brother is one of the star players, we could not take this familial relationship into account. Sorry to say no! Please do try out for one of the rebound girlfriend positions in the future.

This is one of my own:

How to Make Your Home Feel Really Empty in Twelve Steps.

First, place everything you can lift into boxes you retrieved from a dumpster behind a liquor store

Second, carry it all as far away as you can.

Third, If you still have a friend, or an almost-friend––even a sort-of-friend––and perhaps a friend-of-a-friend,

Have them help you take out the things too heavy for you to manage alone.

Fourth, Use a wineglass to trap all the spiders, bees, flies, moths, and roaches, then take them outside and release them.

Fifth, Vacuum every cranny if you have crannies.

Sixth, Vacuum every nook if you have nooks.

Seventh, Vacuum every niche if you have niches.

Eighth, Peel off the sheetrock, roll up the carpets, and wrap the wiring,

Ninth, Gather up all the joists, the boards, the studs,

Tenth, stack the doors, windows, and frames,

But leave one sill.

Eleventh, using a scientifically-proven device,

Suck out all the air, first the nitrogen, then the oxygen, then

The CO-two, the neon, the freon, and the argon.

Finally, for a finishing flourish, find a shallow basket,

Preferably at Goodwill, place it on the one remaining sill,

And arrange in it a dozen sachets of hot-sauce from a Seven-Eleven.  

Then I can live there, and never be reminded of you.

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