This Is Where Your Instincts Run A Little Wild. This Is Where Your Silenced Parts Speak.
This Is Where Your Instincts Run A Little Wild. This Is Where Your Silenced Parts Speak.
Welcome to Week One of Strange Containers: Flash, Hermits & Other Oddities, our 4-Week Intensive For The Kind of Writing You Might Never Do Otherwise!
Hermit crabs are anomuran decapod crustaceans of the superfamily Paguroidea that have adapted to occupy empty scavenged mollusc shells to protect their fragile exoskeletons.
Did you hear that? These sweet little animals (and they are apparently extremely sweet—they’re clean, cute, and unusually friendly) scavenge shells to live in to protect their tender underbellies.
In other words, they find themselves a safe container.
That’s what we’re talking about today: hermit crabs in writing, which is when we stuff one kind of story into a scavenged container not originally meant for it.
Yes, it’s finally time!
Welcome to Strange Containers (if you missed what I’m talking about the link explains), WITD’s much anticipated four-week August intensive! We’re going to have so much fun. Everything you need to participate this week is right here in this post: this craft essay, some stellar example hermit crabs, truly useful craft resources for those who want to dig deeper, and the structured exercises to get you to the page (and into the comments—I can’t wait!).
I’ll go into clear detail about the hermit crab form in the exercise, don’t worry. But first, a reminder that Writing in the Dark offers about four of these seasonal writing craft intensives for paid members every year, and they’re phenomenal. It’s a bananas amount of value for your subscription. A lot of people say they learn more in these intensives (and have more fun) than in any expensive writing course they’ve taken, like this writer: “It's actually been super helpful to work through the exercises in quick succession, like a little writing course... But so much more inspiring and thoughtful and generous and fun than any I've taken before. THANK YOU Jeannine, you are brilliant.”
You can hear other people describe our craft intensives in heartfelt video love notes they’ve sent to us in which they explain how these intensives have changed their writing and their lives, which is the point of WITD. We work together to do language better in order to write better, yes. That’s paramount. But also work together to do language better in order to live more meaningfully and be more human during this one journey we take in this one body we get in this one world we share. It’s a tall order but there is no other way—those aims are inextricably intertwined at Writing in the Dark.
And seasonal intensives are simple to join: it’s all right here on Substack—if you are a paid member, you’re all set, there’s nothing to sign up for, nothing to register for, nothing extra to pay, you just get the goodness delivered to you once a week and watch the comments explode with creative energy that carries us to places we’ve never quite imagined.
If you are new here, you can get a sense of what our intensives are by poking around in the past ones, which is a great way to spend a rainy afternoon, or any afternoon. Here’s a few links to get you started:
A Visceral Self post and the whole intensive.
A Story Challenge post and the whole thing
An Essay Challenge Post and the whole thing
A Creativity Challenge Post and the whole thing
The Writing in the Dark About Page, which explains more about intensives, and our post on How to Actually Write in the Dark And Where to Begin, plus our Curriculum Index.
It’s a treasure trove of curriculum and we want you to know where to find it, because that’s a bit part of the beauty of Writing in the Dark: it’s always here for you, you are never late, and there’s plenty of time for you to work at your own pace. This is a place where we take language seriously while taking ourselves lightly. Life is hard and it’s constantly knocking the breath out of us, and we have to roll with the waves and survive the churn without very much lamenting our “failures.” We just come back up for air and start again, wherever we are.
Sure, we all have wet, tangled hair and a banged up knees, and we’re dripping with seaweed, but we laugh loudly and and cheer each other on like you wouldn’t believe—and as a result I consistently see here some of the best writing that’s crossed my transom in all my 30 years as an editor. It’s writing that’s alive and full of the unknown, writing with one door after another to places we’ve not yet been, writing with depth that gets us under the roiling surface and into the strange, airless, silent seascape of discovery.
We hope you’ll join us.
Now, let’s begin.
I have a thing about containers.
For example, I want—no, let’s just say, I need—food to be put in a container that is the exact right size to hold it. No extra air. It undoes me to see a person plopping a cupful of something into a quart-size Tupperware.
No, this is not about food or Tupperware.
Bear with me.
Actually, let’s back up.
About six years ago, Billie brought their love, Tao, to the United States, the plan being for them to live with Jon and me while they got their footing and Billie finished school. Right before that, they were just two very hip, very independent queer kids in their early twenties, partly in love, partly best friends, having fun and figuring out their lives, living together with their cat in a Shanghai high-rise and taking visa runs around the world every six weeks while facing down the fact that eventually, Billie was going to have to come back to the States and finish their last year of college (no, I was not applying pressure; I trusted Billie, who had already earned several prestigious scholarships including the critical language scholarship that brought them to China in the first place—I knew they’d figure it out).
Anyway, Billie brought Tao back to the U.S., and for a couple of years there we all we were, living together in our Minneapolis home (btw, Hi, Gov Walz!! We love you!!)—me, Jon, Billie, and poor culture-shocked Tao—finding our way as a hodgepodge family, which is pretty much the only kind of family I’ve ever been in. There can be a sweetness to it, this hodgepodge way of being.
Also, what a challenging, intimate, unforgettable time, those couple of years were, as we navigated Tao’s culture shock against the backdrop of one family and societal crisis after another: first, a private, explosive, and heartbreaking experience with my older daughter (Billie’s older sister), one that flattened us and continues to ache but that, at the time, I thought might truly kill me; then, the fast and then slow unraveling of Billie and Tao’s marriage, which, though unconventional, was still held together by threads connected directly to the heart (even now, though they’re definitely just friends, they’re still not “all the way divorced,” in part because of those tender heartstrings); third, the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown and the murder of George Floyd in our city.
Friends, it was a lot.
But did you know you can get these little glass containers online that hold about 4 ounces of rice or curry or about sixteen blueberries?
Sometimes, during those years, Tao would sit at the counter bar as I cleaned up after dinner, assessing me as I assessed the various containers into which I was going to place the half-pan of leftover lasagna or enchiladas or tomato-egg stir fry that he was so good at making. “Too small, Mama,” he’d say, then watch me as, nine times out of ten, I’d wedge the half-pan of whatever it was in one seamless, dancerly move with my giant spatula into my chosen glass container without the slightest hitch. “Oh my god,” Tao would say. “You knew, Mama. You knew.” If I was wrong, though, if I’d miscalculated and now had a “situation,” if I had to start over and size up, Tao would look a little sad for me. “You were so close,” he’d say, often in a voice so genuine and sad I’d feel the pressure erupt instantly behind my eyes, I’d have to blink and look away as if it all really mattered, as if everything depended on it.
Because it did.
The thing about containers and stories is this: the perfect fit is not always the logical shape.
Some stories can’t fit in any container at all, because they simply cannot be told. For a long, long time, my childhood stories were like that. They could only course beneath the surface of everything else I ever wrote, which I have written about here (including the method I used to finally break them free). Now, it’s the stories of my older daughter that course beneath everything else, including all those leftover peanut noodles or wedges of carrot cake or tomato halves that refuse to fit.
“So close, Mama,” Tao always said. Then, if my betraying tears fell: “She loves you, you know.”
Here’s what I like especially well: when a bit of one thing fits into a container not meant for it at all. In the arena of leftover foods, this is like when a plastic raspberry shell provides the perfect home for Z’s leftover PBJ on a hamburger bun. We’re all used to this idea of a container reinventing itself to hold something new. We’ve been doing it all our lives. Shoeboxes only hold shoes in the beginning, before learning to hold letters, rock collections, photographs, and children’s teeth.
Or, what about how some people so smartly use old film canisters for salt and pepper shakers, or storing of vitamins/pills or bobby pins or buttons?
Here’s another example: people all over the place are learning to use shipping containers to store all kinds of other things not originally meant to be in shipping containers—people put them in their backyards as storage sheds for mowers, rakes, and bikes, and even make them into tiny houses that hold beds and tables and little kitchens.
I could go on. Maybe in the comments you can help me brainstorm this list so that we expand to the maximum degree the way we can think about using a container for something it was not originally meant for.
This, friends, is all you need to know to understand the hermit crab form, which is what we are going to play around with first in our Strange Containers seasonal intensive.
This week’s kickoff offers four stunning examples of hermit crab essays/stories (yes, hermits can be fiction or nonfiction) for us to discuss—three are old favorites of mine that I love teaching, and a fourth is new to me and therefore so exciting! Also, I offer you a (totally optional for now or later) resource library of links to some of the best further reading on this form for those who really want to dig deep.
Also, of course, a structured invitation/exercise to get you started on your own hermit crab to share with us in whole or part.
A couple of things to remember:
What you’ll find this week contains resources because I’ve been teaching this form for a long time—but it’s not an info dump: none of the reading is required. Take what’s helpful, in your own time, and leave the rest. It’s okay if you have seaweed in your hair.
It’s also okay to dive in and try some stuff—and, this is super important: do not worry if it is gimmicky. Hermit crabs are a gimmick, that’s the whole point. Writing a story of your first love in the form of a recipe is a gimmick—in fact, writing any story in the form of a recipe or a grocery list is a gimmick, and yet, if you get really deeply through the wall and into your own tender underbelly, you might strike gold anyway, like Sarah Orman Mark did with her gorgeous hybrid hermit crab, On Injustice: For My Sister-In-Law.
If we are going to have fun with this, we’re going to have to set down our preconceived notions of whether or not we’re allowed to try games, puzzles, and, yes, gimmicky doorways into the sublime and the surreal and the soulful and the surprising. Because we are, and we might get some really silly, unusable material. That’s a necessary risk, and who cares? Silly unusable material can be really fun, and if we step aside and refuse to judge that material or ourselves harshly, we have the chance to find something marvelous hiding inside it, one phrase or insight we can take in an entirely unexpected direction. This is a process, not a formula, and we have to leave room for lots of messy who-knows-what.
So, with that said, here are your materials—dig in, have fun, and I will see you in the comments!
Let’s play with Tupperware!