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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.

More Inspiration and Examples

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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.

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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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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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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Writing the Hermit Crab Essay, with Sarah Earle

The Hermit Crab is an essay whose tender, vulnerable truth seeks an outside structure with which to contain it.  Just like the hermit crab itself, which spends its life living in a succession of ever-changing mollusk shells, writers go about combing life’s ocean floor for carapaces for their own material.  These forms might not, at first glance, seem literary: a recipe, a how-to guide, a real estate ad.  Once the writer’s story starts to inhabit the form, there is no telling how that story will grow. In a panel discussion, writer Brenda Miller, who along with Suzanne Paola coined the essay form, explains: ‘[the process of moving into a form] often shows how content wants to expand the story beyond the form, just as a hermit crab outgrows its shell, nudging the boundaries.”

In this half-day class, students will be introduced to the concept of the hermit crab essay and spend time reading and discussing published examples together.  Then, they’ll explore, feeling out their options, picking up shells and deciding if their heft, size, and weight feel right for the story they will contain.  By the end of the class, students will have generated the first draft of a hermit crab essay and have the opportunity to gain feedback from teacher and peers about how they might move their essay forward. 

This workshop will be held online. 

Saturday, October 15, 9:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. ($75)

For seven years,  Sarah Earle  was a lecturer in first-year composition and English as a second language at the University of New Hampshire.  She has also taught creative nonfiction at St. Paul’s Academic Summer Program in Concord, NH, and worked as an editor of Outlook Springs Literary Magazine. She holds her MFA in nonfiction writing from UNH; you can read her essays in  Bayou Magazine  and  The Cobalt Review , and her fiction in  The Rumpus  and  The Carolina Quarterly.

The Hermit Crab Essay: Digging Into Forms

In progress, tuesdays, 3 weeks, 6:00 - 8:00pm ct, instructor:, lara hughes, the porch house at 2811 dogwood pl., nashville, tn 37204, for members, for non-members.

Like the hermit crab, this style of personal essay assumes a borrowed (and often unexpected) form as an outer shell. The narrative’s rich insides are encased and revealed through a different structure. There are limitless possibilities, such as obituaries, recipes, questionnaires, manuals, or ads. In this course, we’ll read and discuss various examples of hermit crab essays. We will explore how the structure itself strengthens the narrative. Through writing exercises, we’ll experiment with various “shells” and draft our own essays, unearthing new meaning and hidden surprises in the unique forms that make each piece even more resonant.

• In-Class Writing Lift: Medium

• Homework: Required

• Workshopping Drafts: Optional

Lara Hughes is a fiction writer who was born in Germany and raised on various military bases. She holds an MFA from Vanderbilt University where she received an Edgar H. Duncan Fellowship Award, taught undergraduate creative writing, and served as Nonfiction Editor for the Nashville Review. She is the winner of the 2022 Emerging Writer’s Prize from The Arkansas International, where her work will be forthcoming in the fall.

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Essay Samples on Hermit Crab

Writing an essay on hermit crab.

If you’re seeking hermit crab essay ideas, consider these:

• explore different facets of hermit crab biology, behavior, and significance.
• examine their fascinating symbiotic relationships with other organisms. Explore how hermit crabs provide homes for anemones, benefiting from their protective stinging tentacles while offering mobility to the stationary anemones.
• explore the intriguing camouflage techniques employed by hermit crabs to blend in with their surroundings, evading predators and enhancing their survival chances.

For those in search of hermit crab essay examples, look to renowned authors who have employed the hermit crab form in their writing. Study the works of acclaimed writers who have crafted personal narratives or essays by utilizing the hermit crab structure. By observing their techniques and creative approaches, you can gain inspiration and insight into how to infuse your own writing with the hermit crab form.

To write an engaging hermit crab essay, it’s essential to intertwine scientific knowledge with personal observations and vivid descriptions. Embark on field trips to observe hermit crabs in their natural habitats, documenting their behavior and interactions. Incorporate sensory details to bring their world to life for your readers.

Remember to structure your essay effectively, employing an engaging introduction that hooks your readers, followed by well-organized body paragraphs. Conclude your essay by summarizing the key points and leaving your readers with a thought-provoking takeaway.

Tank Setup for Hermit Crabs

Hermit crabs make interesting pets when cared for properly. These little crabs are active and when given everything they need, they can have long lives as well. Unfortunately, most pet stores sell them as easy to care for, shelf pets. While they are easy pets...

• Hermit Crab

How Do Hermit Crabs Choose Their Shells

Hermit crabs are decapods crustaceans, of a Subphylum Crustacea and Superfamily Paguridae. Hermit crabs are detritovores which mean they feed on dead organic material especially plant detritus. Hermit crabs tend to use shells from other animals. The shell covers their soft abdomen and regulates moisture...

Why Hermit Crabs Leave Their Shells

Hermit crabs are nice little pets that can live for up to 20 years with you if you take care of them properly. They might not learn to speak or play fetch, but they are fascinating little creatures on their own. They are very active,...

The Diet of Hermit Crabs

Feeding your hermit crabs is an important part of keeping them happy and healthy. Hermit crabs are scavengers, as such, they have evolved to have specific dietary needs. Unlike some species of crabs, it is impossible for a Hermit crab to get everything it needs...

Best topics on Hermit Crab

1. Tank Setup for Hermit Crabs

2. How Do Hermit Crabs Choose Their Shells

3. Why Hermit Crabs Leave Their Shells

4. The Diet of Hermit Crabs

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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?

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].

Work with the best...

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.

This class takes place remotely online via Zoom.

Cleveland oh, related classes.

Developing a Writing Habit - Aug 2024 (FULL)

Powerful Proposals for Nonfiction

Writing the Watershed: Doan Brook Tour and Writing Workshop with NEORSD

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Andria Kennedy

Freelance Writer | Essayist | Artist | Fantasy & Sci-Fi Writer

Why I’m Obsessed with Hermit Crab Essays (And You Will Be, Too)

Do you sometimes find yourself struggling to figure out HOW to say something? The problem isn’t the words – it’s the framework of those sentences. The usual paragraph system just won’t work. (And, no, I’m not going to get into podcasting or Youtubing – is that a word? – here) You want to write in a different way, get your thoughts across in another form. Enter hermit crab essays.

(No, not the paper you wrote about hermit crabs in the third grade)

The beautiful version of creative non-fiction that opens the format of your words to ANYTHING.

Creative Non-Fiction

Let’s start with a quick intro to CNF (if you aren’t familiar with the term). Because hermit crab essays rely on creative non-fiction. (And that “creative” in the title tends to trip people up a bit)

CNF is nothing more than:

A form of storytelling that employs creative techniques such as poetry and fiction to retell a story. ~ Writers.com

Rather than a reported essay that relies on research to fill in the space between personal anecdotes, CNF fleshes out characters the way a short story or novel might. Or they build up the narrative into a complete story arc, creating an engaging narrative. The story remains true (remember, we’re talking “non-fiction”), but it reads more like a fiction piece than something you find in your local paper.

And no pieces of CNF look alike.

The best thing about creative non-fiction is that it’s experimental. Writers come up with newer, wilder ways to tell their stories.

Such as hermit crab essays.

Hermit Crab Essays

Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola developed the term “hermit crab essay” in 2003. It showed up in their book, Tell It Slant . They carried the definition further in a related book in 2018, The Shell Game . Both are collections of CNF that take on extremely unconventional forms:

• How-to instructions
• Marriage licenses
• Rubik’s cubes
• Crossword puzzles
• Police reports

You do (and don’t) read the pieces like you would an ordinary essay. The different “shells” presented add extra insight to the topic presented. The form appropriated provides the characterization, environment, or even background exposition.

And you see that in the official definition of the hermit crab essay:

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.” ~Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola

Strip away the unusual formatting, and the piece loses its meaning. It turns into a poor, defenseless crab – vulnerable to attack by predators. (Okay, I promise not to dive into a scientific lecture here)

The Beauty of Hermit Crab Essays

ANYTHING has the potential to become a hermit crab essay.

If you can see it – and attach meaning – you can write it.

Once you begin reading through some of these pieces, your mind starts churning, and you can’t contain the impulse to write them. Not to mix species, but the world becomes your oyster.

• Forms you fill out repetitively?
• Playlists you craft?
• Tests you take?
• Directions you follow?

Everything holds the possibility to become a piece of CNF when you eliminate the strictures of form. And you don’t lose a word of the meaning you want to express. You may even find yourself STRENGTHENING your message – all by your choice of “shell.”

Remember that unique voice of yours? This is another chance to stand out from the crowd. Because NO ONE else will look at a poster and take away the same thoughts as you. Or glimpse an encyclopedia entry and reflect on a moment in your life. Hermit crab essays are as unique as the tiny crustaceans they’re named for.

Invisible Inks

As soon as I read my first hermit crab, I was hooked.

I couldn’t see anything around me without my writing brain itching to turn it into an essay. So many elements in my life attached themselves to everyday objects. I found myself creating anecdotes for the most mundane things – like grocery lists and flyers.

Which is how Invisible Inks came to be.

I wanted a chance to explore and play with my love for hermit crab essays. And attaching my support for invisible illnesses – a natural inclination – made sense. (Mostly because so many of my anecdotes lean in that direction)

THIS is what happens when you start thinking outside of the box, though. You find your creativity blooming. Everything begins looking different. Before you know it, you have to work to write a NORMAL essay.

Pick a Shell

Look up hermit crab essays. (I have NO idea where you might be able to read some. **cough** Invisible Inks **cough**)

Read through them.

And then look around you. See what pulls at your imagination. Give writing one of these pieces of CNF a try.

You might like it!

Then post what “shell” you decided to give a try. Inspire someone else to look at that format in a new light!

Happy hunting, Crabbies!

Spread the Kreativity:

Published by Andria Kennedy

I speak the thoughts rattling around in my brain, sharing topics I think other people want and should hear (or are afraid to talk about themselves). I bring my personality and quirky state of mind to everything I write; serious topics shouldn't be devoid of humor. I've been writing for as long as I can remember. It's a source of solace and enjoyment for me. I'm lucky enough to call what I love my career - so it's NOT work! I live in Virginia with the Minions (four cats, a Greyhound, and a Cavalier King Charles spaniel) and my wonderful husband, who ensures I stay fed (no cereal for dinner) and as close to sane as I can get. View all posts by Andria Kennedy

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Ed Asher Briant

Printmaking, Poetry, and Bookmaking.

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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Hermit Crab Essays

When a little structure is needed for your vulnerable content.

If you are new here, hello and welcome! I am Mel Parks and I run creative writing workshops in Sussex, UK while being a freelance writer, researcher and editor. I began this Substack, Awen, in 2022 as a gathering place for my thoughts about the writing process and to share some stories and creative inspiration along the way. Awen is free to read and share.

I run a weekly Tuesday afternoon (2-3pm UK time) guided creative writing session on live on Zoom for paid members. If you’d like to join, click the subscribe button and choose paid membership for £8 per month or £80 per year. If you are not able to subscribe (or don’t want to!), then please email me for alternative ways to join.

My UNFURL season of workshops began with a labyrinth, went into the depths of a cave, then explored underwater worlds. We are beginning to come up for air now and this week’s theme was rockpools. As a slight tangent, this week, I thought I’d take the hermit crab as a character to work with and linked the hermit crab essay.

It’s a fascinating creature as it finds empty shells of molluscs to live in to protect its vulnerable soft body. The shell has to be exactly the right size, weight, shape and even colour. They have to find new homes as they grow. This can result in some house-swap chains as each crab searches for the perfect place.

A hermit crab essay borrows an existing form of writing — a recipe, instructions, for sale advert, labels, album notes — for structure. This can protect vulnerable content ‘but act as a firm container for content that might be intellectually or emotionally difficult’ (Randon Billings Noble, A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays )

I am in the beginning stages of writing a nature memoir celebrating weeds and this week, I asked myself the question: who am I writing this book for? and the answer came to me: for my (anxious, unconfident) younger self . So this is my hermit crab essay - a book dedication to my younger self:

I dedicate this book to the quiet child who cherished the treasure she found in her Christmas stocking one year: The I-Spy Guide to Wildflowers . She took it with her on walks and added up the points every time she saw a clump of primroses in the hedgerows. To the same child who gathered goose grass to feed to the donkey over the gate in the nearby field, who made a wish every time she blew the seeds of a dandelion clock into the wind, and sucked nectar out of the base of clover petals.

I dedicate this book to the brave teenager who left Swansea for a summer job in Massachusetts taking care of a couple of small children. The teenager who walked slowly with each of those children in their neighbourhood clutching a tiny basket to gather wildflowers to display in a jam jar at home. The teenager who watched the sunset with them from their decking as part of a bedtime ritual.

I dedicate this book to the resilient twenty something who stretched out in London parks making daisy chains, ran her hands through the seed heads on long grasses in her rental communal garden, and grew ferns on her shady balcony, while looking out at the neighbour’s walled garden of vegetable rows and wondering about a future life.

I dedicate this book to the younger version of myself who has sometimes felt like a weed, overlooked, quietly finding her way in the world, growing anyway, no matter what.

If you want to read more about hermit crab essays

https://true.proximitymagazine.org/2018/01/18/randonbillingsnoble/

https://nadjamaril.com/2022/09/04/writer-tired-of-rejections-try-penning-a-hermit-crab-essay/

https://thinairmagazine.org/2018/11/03/the-hermit-crab-essay-brenda-miller-unshells-her-own/

Creative Writing Workshops with me (Mel Parks)

**new** haiku to haibun: the japanese way of nature writing.

A nature-based creative writing workshop at Sussex Prairie Garden (in-person) on 1 August 2024. 10-1.30pm.

A creative writing workshop based in nature making the most of the peaceful environment at Sussex Prairie Garden. We will take a gentle stroll through the garden guided by me (Mel Parks), pausing now and then to write and quietly notice the surroundings with all of our senses.

Back in the gallery space, next to the tea shop, we will take a break for tea, coffee and biscuits, before using what we've written in the garden to create haiku and haibun. These brief Japanese forms of writing, developed by Basho in the seventeenth century on his poetry walks, are perfect for capturing moments and the essence of experiences in nature. They are also an ideal starting point, even if you have never done creative writing before and they are brilliant for nature journalling too.

£60 for the morning session, which also includes entry to the garden, where you can linger for as long as you like in the afternoon.

Let me know by replying to this email if you’d be interested in this workshop on Zoom.

Tuesday afternoons on Zoom (2-3pm UK time)

£8 per month or £80 per year with a paid Awen Substack subscription.

We started a new season last week, but you can join in anytime. Break: 28 May & 4 June Last session: 16 July.

12 sessions altogether. You can come to as many as you are able to. 

If you are not able to subscribe (or don’t want to!), then please email me for alternative ways to join.

Monthly Tuesday evenings in East Grinstead (7-9pm)

Thursday mornings in east grinstead (10-12noon).

Series of five weeks beginning on 13 June (13 June; 20 June; 27 June; 4 July; 11 July)

If you attend my face-to-face groups regularly, you can also attend the Zoom group for no extra charge. 

I have an online space where I post exercises and other resources so you can catch up if you miss a session or you'd like to return to something after the workshop. 

Until next time…

This newsletter was created by Mel Parks , a writer, researcher and workshop facilitator based in Sussex, UK. Mel runs writing workshops locally and on Zoom and researches creativity in midlife as well as her personal connection to nature. She has been widely published and is currently working on a series of moon and plant-inspired essays.

It is free to read and share, but if you value my work, please do stop by my virtual honesty box and leave a handful of loose change.

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