Track 1: Somewhere Only We Know – Keane (3:57)
I teach creative writing at a university that I once left for a year because I was institutionalized for bipolar disorder. When I walk through these same gothic halls on my way to teach literature seminars, I can’t help but feel like I carry my madness with me – fluid through time, taking on a new shape as I encourage undergraduates much like my younger self to pinpoint the stories that make them move. I see them carrying the same anxieties, responsibilities, and sometimes, connections to other realities, that I once did. I see them struggling to find themselves “being believed as credible knowers, as well as being merely heard.”1 I see my students look towards me as a fellow unreliable narrator, and I understand the impact of being open with my psychiatric history in a teaching position such as this, to help generate new and sustainable forms for writing and teaching. To do this work is equally about creative exploration and survival. I’ve never known a kind of writing that wasn’t both.
Track 2: Say It – Maggie Rogers (3:40)
I have worked in the realm of mental health writing in many capacities across my career thus far. The first place I ever taught creative writing was in a psychiatric ward, where my collaborators often personified their diagnoses with both wit and worry, finding that labels often opened doors to resources but sometimes closed doors to communication with their loved ones. I have worked on a largescale corporate mental health campaign, splintering myself in two as both communicator and target audience. In the cultural centres where I’ve taught about racial histories and mental health, my writers have struggled to land on common language to describe the hurt they carry across generations of familial story. At the university where I lecture, my students are well-versed in DSM signifiers and their subsequent memeification, but write with tenderness towards the many parts of themselves that defy definition and containment. It is at these intersections that I teach hermit crab essays, knowing that our language is always limited but reaching towards mutual understanding, exploring structures and forms that might bring our diverging stories a little bit closer.
The hermit crab essay was first described by Miller & Paola in Tell It Slant, positioned as the adoption of pre-existing forms as a container for personal storytelling – as their popularity has grown, these innovative essays have taken the shape of family recipes, instructional manuals, obituaries and other familiar forms, reimagining the cultural expectations that shape them. The form has been explored in many different capacities, most notably categorized in the essay collection The Shell Game.2 As Miller notes, hermit crabs are born without the protection they need to survive, and thus must find homes that shelter them.3 Similarly, as a mad writer, educator and researcher, I have adopted the hermit crab form as a mad methodology, a helpful way to re-encounter and analyze my lived experience in the shelter of a narrative shell. In my teaching work both at the university and in mental health centres, I share this practice to help writers on the margins take authorship over their own difficult stories.
In Disability, Self and Society, Titchkosky writes that “attending to disability experience brings what for many people is part of the background features of life, typically unnoticed and unthought, into the foreground.”4 To me, using storytelling “shells” allows us to call attention to the social structures that shape the way we narrate our own experiences of disability. Writing in relation to external structures, in the same way I live alongside them, has removed some of the pressure around representation and allowed me to recontextualize my trauma safely. In the therapeutic arenas where I first taught writing, there was a focus on the application of arts-based methods in clinical settings, often cited as “a strengths-based approach because people who are trauma-affected are provided with a space to re-engage with their adverse experiences that enables, and prioritises, choices, power and creativity over how, and what, they share.”5 Back then, I was often asked to create writing prompts that focused on factors like resilience, even though I was drawn to prompts that instead questioned the ways we had been asked to explain ourselves and scaffold our stories. Bringing hermit crab essays into the university allowed me to return to those larger structural questions and encourage my students to ask their own.
Track 3: Should’ve Been Me – Mitski (3:11)
My first hermit crab essay came to me in a bout of mania ten years ago, while I was working on an undergraduate creative writing assignment. My essay was due the following day, but I was worried that I was too unwell to write it – and so, to find out if this was the case, I decided to write a paper that walked me through every question on the Goldberg Mania Scale.
18. I find it hard to slow down and stay in one place.
a. Not at all
b. Just a little
c. Somewhat
d. Moderately
e. Quite a lot X
f. Very much
My therapist spends a lot of time trying to get me to stay in the moment. I’m so easily caught up in my own mistakes and weaknesses that I often force myself to think, not feel. I’m never where I think I’m supposed to be. The night that I am writing to you, I trace the scar that marks his chest with one finger, ask him what his warning label is. Fragile – do not shake, he tells me. I don’t make any promises. It’s the closest I’ve come to flying within my own veins.
Looking back at this essay, there is a certain recognizable “incoherence” that makes the piece tick. But at the same time, nestled within the structure of the survey, there is agency too. Titchkosky proposes disability as “a space of interpretive encounter,” in that “everyone participates in making what is noticed and imagined as disability.”6 By both writer and reader encountering disability stories through a seemingly recognizable shell, together, they can confront the societal expectations of the shape and the narrative itself.
Reclaiming this medical shell for personal storytelling helped me find a safe way to articulate the “feel” of my marginality, rather than focusing too much on finding a single, correct narrative of how it came to be. As Leavy writes, “The immediacy of art provides a viscerally felt sensorial experience, an embodied knowledge that is effective at communicating emotional aspects of social life.”7 With this paper, I passed the course, and this act of shape-making became a notable part of my artistic practice.
Track 4: Thinkin Bout You – Frank Ocean (3:21)
Explaining hermit crab essays as a creative form can make the writing sound like a lot of work. And so, I often introduce my practice in a more collaborative way. In most hermit crab workshops that I’ve taught, we begin by creating a class playlist:
We choose, as a class, an anticipatory feeling for our time together, and capture that feeling in a single word.
Next, we each choose a song that evokes said feeling, and write the track name at the top of our page.
Then, we free write for 10 minutes about a memory associated with that song – focusing on the sights, smells, sounds and feels of that moment in time.
Finally, we share (as much as is comfortable) about our chosen songs, memories, and writing processes. The sharing is often shaped by a sense of wonder about song as a vehicle for memory, and how much pressure was lifted by having a shape to work through.
The music I’ve collected over the years ranges from contemporary cool tracks by Laufey to instrumentals by Beethoven to classic Johnny Cash to songs in additional languages that continue to translate the feel of the room. After the class, the playlist is shared so that writers can return to that particular prompt and recall that sometimes “telling it slant” means not describing events exactly as they happen, but in a way that wraps you in memory. And the playlist of one class is often played in the presence of a future class, keeping us all connected through time.
Track 5: Time After Time – Cyndi Lauper (4:01)
Singer proposes that experimenting with narrative time is what creates the hybrid feel of hermit crab essays.8 As someone who is continuously writing in crip time, I can’t help but recall Samuels: “Crip time is time travel. Disability and illness have the power to extract us from linear, progressive time with its normative life stages and cast us into a wormhole of backward and forward acceleration, jerky stops and starts, tedious intervals and abrupt endings.”9 Perhaps the nonlinear experience of hermit crab essays is something that just feels natural when already living time through the disruption of illness. Perhaps by recasting this fragmentation as an aspect of disability aesthetics, I am searching for familiarity to contain felt chaos. In his essay “On Fragmentation,” Fellner asks: “Is trying to create a coherent narrative a sickness in and of itself?”10 It’s a question that I’m constantly wrestling with throughout my workshops.
Through my first round teaching hermit crab essays at the university, I was lucky to be spending time with scholar and artist Mimi Khúc, reading early chapters from her eventual publication dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss. Khúc writes eloquently about her choice to “hack” the DSM to reveal truths about mental wellness/unwellness in Asian American communities and critique the limits of existing scholarly forms: “Received, calcified, tradition-bound forms limit knowledge and meaning making; they silo and encourage individual labor, neoliberal conceptions of the self, and ideologies of merit. And within these conceptions and ideologies lie normative bounds of time…Hacking disrupts this dominance. It asserts that power must be interrogated and intervened in. It takes back authority, places it in the hands of those not normally allowed to access it.”11
Allowing the shape-shifting form of hermit crab essays to bring us closer to our experiences of nonnormative time embraces mad wisdom instead of making it more coherent or palatable to non-disabled audiences. Within scholarship, it breaks the trajectory of linear achievement and allows us to “hack” the structures that have categorized, compartmentalized, and reduced us as storytellers. It is an embrace of mad wisdom that also reveals the incompleteness of the shells that shape us, and ourselves as writers of our own histories.
Track 6: Feels Like We Only Go Backwards – Tame Impala (3:12)
While I’ve found the creative boundaries of hermit crab essays to be immensely freeing, the form is not without its critics. Singer argues that the moniker of hermit crab essay is just a stand-in for “the false document…a way of creating a greater sense of realism and authenticity.”12 However, I often find that working in memoir already assumes a sense of real, and instead what we writers are working towards is a reimagined sense of self. Repurposing the documents of my own past, revisiting dramatic occurrences with a fresh perspective – it is an offering of grace that wasn’t internally available before.
In The Wounded Storyteller, Frank writes of “narrative wreck,” about storytelling as an act of repair.13 But in so many pieces that I teach, there is no fixing – only the reclamation of language and structures that have previously been unsafe to us. Prior criticisms of disability life writing have been cited by Couser, including Mitchell and Davis, the latter who once wrote, “By narrativizing an impairment, one tends […] to link it to the bourgeois sensibility of individualism and the drama of an individual story.”14 Couser also cites the rise of disability memoirs as “out of sync with the ‘social model’” and focused on individual control rather than underlying relationalities.15 But writing in relation to the structures that surround us pushes back against individual triumph or failure.
Richardson writes about the rise of “new ethnographic species” that feature “qualitative writing [that adapts] to the kind of political/social world we inhabit – a world of uncertainty.”16 She writes that language offers us “competing ways of giving meaning and of organizing the world,” making language “a site of exploration and struggle.” I believe that the visual nature of hermit crab essays can give extra layers of meaning to that exploration, allowing scholars and creatives alike to reveal the tenets of social organization and linguistic contradictions that have sought to define disability in our everyday lives. But as Titchkosky reminds us, “Disability inserts the ambiguity of between-ness into the world” and thus there is no limit to the amount of shapes that can hold and create meaning for us.17 There is no final realm of language that can put at rest our search for words.
As such, in my university courses, I often teach Rowan McCandless’ stunning essay “What Are You?: A Field Study” – which disrupts the language of race and identity through the format of a glossary – as a practice of re-encountering the words that hem us in and creating new structures through which to dream.18
Track 7, ft. Rowan McCandless:
Side A: My Favourite Things – John Coltrane (13:44)
“Tell Me Why”
The hermit crab essay can be likened to an ensemble of instruments and voices. Being in harmony and produced in unison, the hermit crab essay reminds me of the smooth stylings and improvisations found in jazz.
I became intrigued with the hermit crab form after reading Biss’ “The Pain Scale,” in which she uses a traditional pain scale to describe her experiences of having chronic pain.19 I could relate to her work as I also struggle with debilitating pain. But it was her style of writing that attracted me most. I wanted to be able to write a way that both condensed and expanded the feel of description, even though I had no idea how to go about it. Then in 2015, I enrolled in an online course devoted to hybrid essay structures and discovered a curriculum that taught me about various non-traditional forms, including the hermit crab essay.
The hermit crab essay is one of my favourite forms when writing creative nonfiction. It compliments my neurodivergent way of thinking and allows me to write into sometimes difficult territory without the dysregulation that often occurs when writing a traditional essay. As a Black and biracial writer diagnosed with PTSD, depression, and an anxiety disorder, this essay form provides me with a way into my personal stories, a way to discuss issues related to mental health, domestic abuse, dysfunctional family systems, racism, misogyny, homophobia, to name but a few.
As one of two facilitators of Spark Your Story Intensive, a twelve-week online intensive designed to familiarize writers with the outlier forms of creative nonfiction, the hermit crab remains my favourite structure to teach. I’ve witnessed writers engage with the intellectual/emotional divide and the structure/content conundrum and come away with fantastic essays. Like myself, many of my students found that they could use the hermit crab structure to dig deep and write essays on complex topics and experiences. Crafting hermit crab essays was crucial to discovering their writerly voices.
“Come Together”
The interplay between form and content in creating a hermit crab essay is what comes first, the chicken or the egg scenario. Content is crucial, but so is the choice of structure. With this particular form of essay, the hermit crab component is akin to a protective shell that envelopes the essence of the essay. I often draft this work by creating a brief outline and selecting the shell best for a particular piece. From there, I expand upon the content. Both parts must work together in concert, a duet in perfect harmony.
“Future Days”
Although hermit crab essays are lesser known within the field of creative nonfiction, I believe that this innovative sub-genre is receiving an increasingly warm reception. My first foray incorporated geographical terms as the basis to discuss home and belonging, winning the 2015 creative nonfiction contest for Room. My work has also been recognized by the National Magazine awards in the category of one-of-a-kind-storytelling, which signals an embrace of nonlinear forms. As the creative nonfiction editor with The Fiddlehead, I’ve seen an increase in the number of hermit crab essays submitted to the journal, where memory is deconstructed and time is non-linear in nature. The best examples are the ones that create a fascinating tension between content and construct.
The key to creating a hermit crab essay is deciding what “shell” to occupy and how that relates to your themes, concealing content in places like liner notes, travelogues, recipes, and how-to manuals. Next, I mind-map to generate material, testing out the different ways a story can fill a particular shape. Keeping a journal which contains an ever-evolving list of potential hermit crab forms and different memories to re-encounter helps in the early stages of production. Different shapes can prompt different emotional reactions for both the writer and the reader, and the immersive feel of encountering both reactions simultaneously can make for a standout reading experience.
Reading other essayists who experiment with form has been helpful to my practice - some of my favourite authors include Chelsey Clammer, Sarah Miner, and Elissa Washuta. I do not think that it is accidental that the hermit crab form has often been taken up by women writers. Within the medical system, within family dynamics and within close relationships, there is a long history of women having to prove their pain – and perhaps hermit crab essays’ close relationship with documentation and fact provides some scaffolding for the most difficult of truth-telling. Hermit crab essays give voice to those who are not often heard, provide a way forward for those who think tangentially, and allow those with trauma to tell their stories without retraumatizing the author. As a hybrid form, the hermit crab essay has much to offer both as a creative pursuit and a pathway towards grappling with emotional memory.
Side B - Changes – David Bowie (3:38)
As further mapping of the popularity of the hermit crab essay, I offer a dissection of my book, Persephone’s Children: A Life in Fragments.20 Written as a non-linear mosaic memoir, it contains numerous hermit crab essays.
A Map of the World: Geographical terms act as a springboard to discuss various aspects of leaving unsafe situations, being an outsider, and finding my place in the world.
Binding Resolutions: A legal contract contrasts the different points of view of a domestic partnership gone horribly wrong.
Blood Ties: A Primer: an Abecedarian, an alphabetical sequence that explores personal and familial generational ties that often bind.
Practical Magic: A witch’s grimoire reveals issues during childhood that were tempered by my child-like belief in magik and how a premonition about my eldest daughter’s pregnancy set me on a journey from Winnipeg to Calgary to be with her.
Found Objects: An Archeological Field Study provides the backdrop to a summer spent up North on an archeological dig when I was fifteen going on sixteen, peeling back the layers of time, it tells a story of independence, innocence, and the aftermath of sexual assault.
Forest Tree Branch Root: A gardener’s journal gives a glimpse of the time I spent at the crisis response centre for almost a week because of suicidal thoughts and major depression - my connection to nature and the urban forest kept me grounded to the world outside of the Crisis Stabilization Unit.
Hunger Games: A Quiz: taking the format of a fashion magazine questionnaire, my struggles with self, self-image, and eating disorders are examined.
Vocal Lessons: A Diagnostic Report: using the frame of a diagnostic report, this hermit crab essay delves into finding my voice after leaving an abusive relationship.
Each of these pieces on their own took deep reflection, emotional distance, and creative reframing, but standing back to see these pieces as a whole – I am inviting readers into a life in full.
Track 8: I Was a Kaleidoscope – Death Cab For Cutie (2:50)
Within conversations about disability and madness, the story that is often demanded of us is one of explanation. The hermit crab format, through its many shifting shells, evades certainty and singularity. It embraces a kaleidoscopic look at life on the margins. For the sick, mad, neuroatypical, and disabled writers who have come to embrace this genre, it is an opportunity to reclaim authorship. To move within the medical system means constantly to have your life narrated by others, to not be believed in critical moments, to learn to tell your story in a way that allows you to be heard. But as a creative research method, hermit crab essays allow us to lean on recognizable shapes to begin the act of storytelling, and then offers opportunities for critical analysis and personal reflection by interrogating the “rules” of the form as we write.
Hess writes about the difficulties of trying to “represent mad stories amid the need for coherence” that often defines traditional research.21 When assigning hermit crab essays in my classroom, however, I find that my students are less concerned about external audience readings than the internal sense-making that can emerge from this practice. The essay, especially when considering disability, turns from what happened to you to how do we hold this happening? The unique structure of each essay recaptures the sense of the experience rather than pressuring writers to relay clean causality.
Track 9, ft. Sara Hashemi: Home – Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros (5:06)
“And when you think you are only visiting a place, you might not put effort into turning that new country into a home. You might decide it’s easier to just live out of a suitcase.”22
For a long time, I lived out of a suitcase as I moved through academic spaces like classrooms, essays, and articles that taught me how to write and what to think. I was a psychology student but could never find a home in my discipline. It was not until I discovered the field of health humanities and disability poetics that I found a place I could call home. The hermit crab form, in particular, gave me the shells to do so. Creative writing was a big part of my life before university as a means of self-expression and a way to communicate my ideas. When I got to university, the traditional essay format and the weight of academic expectations made it hard to keep up with my creative pursuits. I had no idea my creative life and educational work around psychology and disability did not have to be separate.
Being a student of the hermit crab form showed me the possibility of reconciling my love for creative writing with my academic work around disability. When I took a class at the University of Toronto with Leanne called Disability Arts and Culture, I learned about the role of creative writing in disrupting linear understandings of time and ideas of healing. I started experimenting with different forms of creative writing, such as poetry. It allowed me to think more freely and step out of the rigid expectations of linear writing and essay formats I had been accustomed to. The hermit crab form allowed me to bring my everyday life into my creative writing through shells such as playlists, maps, and dictionaries. Similarly, it allowed me to incorporate my lived experiences around disability and mental illness into my creative work rather than keeping them separate. In this way, it disrupted the traditional idea of “academic forms of writing” and what they entail and the idea of “expertise” as something separate from lived experience.
Through my journey with the hermit crab form, I reflected on my relationship with the two languages I speak: Farsi and English. Language has always shaped how I think, and for the first time, I started conveying that through hermit crab essays. I started writing poems that used words in English and Farsi to refer to experiences of mental health and illness, using the dictionary as a shell to express my ideas. Through this practice, I also exposed how language shapes the way we think about our experiences and perceptions of health and illness. I was able to disentangle the power of words - or a noticeable lack thereof - in shaping disability narratives:
“Sometimes four names translate to one:
غمگین، سودازده، آشفتھ، ملول
sad, sad, sad, sad
and you call it all the same thing
and the words you use to describe my pain, they slowly become how I think.
until I forget how to feel my pain, and to live in my body.
I migrate from my body to concepts
like I do from one language to another,
when I try to translate myself.
Let me show you my pain bare and exposed
unveiled from concepts and words and their translations.
My gift to you is my pain, my mind, me, bare and exposed.
Your gift to me is giving
up the urge to look for coherence for sense for convention.
to bear my bare pain.”
For me, this highlighted the role of therapy, and psy discourses generally, in dominating language and shaping our experience of wellness, illness, and healing. The dominance of such language, up to that point, had rendered my lived experience, as well as narratives of non-recovery undervalued. In exposing the limitations of language, my aim was not to make a value judgement of therapy and psychiatric language per se. Rather, I hoped to problematize the dominance of such discourse at the expense of other narratives and knowledge-frameworks, including lived and embodied experiences. The problematizing of such dominance also extends to the narratives they promote, narratives that uphold a certain notion of care and wellness that are at times, rooted in ableist and capitalist logics.
Many of my experiences around mental illness were shaped by western psychiatric frameworks and the language that comes with it. I started experimenting with dictionary lines as a shell to talk about the different words in each language that refer to “pain,” “illness,” “healing,” and “medicine.” For example, what I had grown up calling “nervousness” translated to “anxiety disorder” when I moved to Canada. Sometimes, I would forget what it felt like to experience and express my pain in Farsi. Contrasting the two sides of the translation helped me return to my native language, make room for it in my academic work, and feel at home. I never thought about my experiences with what I now know as PTSD and anxiety through a medical lens, until I encountered psychiatric language. In a way, the hermit crab form, and the dictionary shells I used, were an opportunity to remember what my experiences were like prior. In an assignment, I note: “There was more talk of my ‘illness’ than my ‘pain’ itself.” Through the hermit crab shells, I was able to re-connect to my experiences and point out the ways that the language of illness and diagnosis had at times taken over an understanding of my pain, where it comes from, and where it takes me.
While I chose to adopt some of the psychiatric frameworks that helped me better understand my experiences, I was reminded not to let go of my personal lived experiences. In this way, my experiences with creative writing have also inspired my pursuits outside the classroom. I was inspired to learn more about arts-based methods and their role in capturing lived experiences of health and healing, as reflected in health humanities and narrative medicine. Being a student of the hermit crab form has given me the shells I need to contain my creativity. It has introduced me to new possibilities of reflection, critique, and self-expression that aim to disrupt the dominance of psychiatric knowledge frameworks in thinking about mental health.
Track 10: I Don’t Need No Doctor – Ray Charles (2:32)
During the last term where I taught my hermit crab essay assignment at the university, I was simultaneously completing a certificate in narrative medicine; a sole psychiatric survivor in a class of doctors, nurses, paramedics, and other healthcare professionals. Narrative medicine was popularized by Columbia University, as a way of strengthening clinician-patient communication and care, and bringing humanities approaches into health care spaces to better highlight patient narratives.23 Despite my hang-ups on participating in a med school program, I was there, as usual, because I wanted to be heard. Given my history as a psychiatric survivor, sometimes I can be a bit confrontational when it comes to the helping professions – and yet, I do think that part of my writing practice is to bridge experiences and heal systemic scars. The idea is not to “repair” ourselves through story – because so often, disability is a wisdom we continue to carry throughout our lives, and fragmentation reflects the experience of moving through a broken system – but to find a way to voice the stories that matter to us without wounding ourselves again.
Behrendt explains that “illness narrative advocates” often focus on the implied benefits of the practice – most importantly, life trajectory repair and identity restoration.24 She argues that reflecting on past events does not – and should not – make or break an entire life or identity, and that more specifically, “especially in the case of traumatic experience, narrative can and should simply be allowed to fail.”25 I agree, but believe that having a shell that allows for experimentation, self-discovery, and yes, failure, helps focus on the personal craft rather than the imagined impact, as if our pain should always have to mean something to someone else to be valid. It removes a need to educate or explain and instead focuses on the feel of both the experience and the writing. It’s a scaffolding to support us when words fail us, as they so often do. And that understanding that limit before we even start writing is part of the crip/mad emotional intelligence that drives this creative practice.26
Track 11: I’ll Be Your Mirror – The Velvet Underground, Nico (2:16)
As I write the final track for this playlist, I am serving as Writer-in-Residence at Fountain House, the world’s largest mental health clubhouse, surrounded by fellow mad writers and psychiatric survivors. The question I have been asked most often during my tenure - in workshops, in office hours, on panels - is how do we write through our most difficult truths while continuing to care for ourselves? I don’t believe that this is a skill that I had explicitly been taught to develop during my creative writing education, but I realize now that it was a skill I needed to survive, as both a mad person and a writer. There are many ways to answer this question, of course, but this is ours. And we hope that this list of mad wisdom, of crip kindness, of neurodivergent pebbles to clutch in moments of overwhelm, helps ground other writers in the same way it has grounded us through its writing.
There are many beautiful ways to tell a story, but we are commonly asked for a particular narrative thread that offers coherence, resolution, clarity, when disabled life often evades these easy answers (as does this article, in many ways). Through the beautiful uncertainty of our minds and bodies, we search for different shapes to pour our words into at different times in our lives, finding support for our most radical acts of truth-telling through the hermit crab form. And now, we offer this shell to you, in case you one day feel moved to fill it with story.