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> Jennifer Young

Hermit Crabs to the Rescue: Using Creative Nonfiction as a

Bridge to Academic Prose

This article describes a one-session classroom activity that employs an unusual creative nonfiction genre (the hermit crab essay) to initiate first-year writers into the practice of successfully integrating academic research in their work. I share step-by-step instructions for implementation, along with classroom resources and materials necessary to conduct

the assignment.

InstructIonal note

One of the biggest challenges of teaching first-year writing is to achieve these two goals simultaneously: (1) teach content that is truly engaging for students

who are not necessarily invested in writing as an endeavor; and (2) teach content that prepares students to write in the academy. The dilemma this challenge presents is that the types of writing most students enjoy—creative writing or personal narrative writing, for example—don’t necessarily help them develop the skills and strategies to write a research paper in an upper-level biology course or an argumentative thesis in a political science course. Yet there is ample research that connects student engagement with student success—students retain more knowledge when they find course content interesting and worthwhile. Bryna Siegel Finer, for example, notes that teaching toward the goal of genre transfer is most successful when she is able to “make writing meaningful [to students] so that they will take what they learn in my classroom and carry it with them to other writing situations” (315).

For the past several years, I’ve confronted this challenge by adopting a first-year composition pedagogy that is rooted in creative nonfiction teaching methods and writing forms; I’ve tried to use the literary and artistic elements students enjoy to teach the scholarly skills I know they need. Since 2003, when College English dedicated an entire issue to creative nonfiction (CNF), many have addressed the ways in which such an orientation not only doesn’t compromise the development of traditional composition skills but actually infuses texts with personality and flow and supports creative and critical thinking (Anderson; Bishop; Bloom; Bourelle; Hesse; Tobin; Whetham). The essayist Phillip Lopate offers a succinct articulation of the intersection of creative nonfiction and academic writing, noting the importance of being a good storyteller (xxxviii) but also of “[lending] authority” to one’s message through reference and citation (xli); he also describes the necessity of leading one’s

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audience not just to a point but through it—to expose and describe the cognitive processes behind the reasoning, to make logical development explicit (xliv). Lee Gutkind, the founding and current editor of the journal Creative Nonfiction, describes the genre as being uniquely suited as a vehicle for factual and relevant informa-

tion. He writes that “creative nonfiction writers do not make things up; they make ideas and information that already exist more interesting and often more acces-sible” (12). Certainly, being able to make nonfiction writing more interesting and more accessible is a useful goal for first-year writers; achieving it not only makes the writing process more rewarding but also strengthens the finished product.

Good things happened when I started teaching composition more like creative nonfiction. My students and I started having a lot more fun in the classroom—they were clearly more engaged, classroom discussions were livelier, and the writing was far more interesting and suddenly characterized by voice, confidence, and creativity that

process-based approaches had never yielded in my classes. Unfortunately, what didn’t happen was that my students were able to parlay their newfound enthusiasm and flow into academic writing with research; when we were ready to make the transition from narratives and profiles to anything that incorporated research, their prose immediately reverted to the clunky and convoluted forms that I’d read in all the process-based composition courses I’d taught for years previously. This is when “hermit crabs” came to the rescue.

One of the most interesting and successful assignments I’ve incorporated in my CNF-based comp courses, the “hermit crab” essay “[adopts an already existing form] as the container for the writing at hand, such as the essay in the form of a ‘to-do’ list, or a field guide, or a recipe” (Miller). In her craft essay published in Brevity, Brenda Miller, the author of Tell it Slant: Creating, Refining, and Publishing Creative Nonfiction, provides a short and succinct but extremely useful discussion of how to incorporate the hermit crab essay in class, and she offers brief examples of the form, such as this one she wrote, in which a letter from deceased fetuses takes the structure of a rejection letter:

October 26, 1979 Dear Potential Mom, Thank you for providing a host home for us for the few weeks we stayed in residence. It was lovely but, in the end, didn’t quite work for us. While we tried to be unobtrusive in our exit, the narrowness of your fallopian tubes required

Good things happened when I started teaching composition

more like creative nonfiction. My students and I started having a

lot more fun in the classroom—they were clearly more

engaged, classroom discussions were livelier, and the writing was far more interesting and

suddenly characterized by voice, confidence, and creativity that process-based approaches had

never yielded in my classes.

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some damage. Sorry about that. You were too young to have children anyway, you know that, right? And you know it wasn’t your fault, not really. . . Still, we enjoyed our brief stay in your body and wish you the best of luck in conceiving children in the future. With gratitude, Ira and Isabelle (Miller)

Excerpt from “We Regret to Inform You” from An Earlier Life by Brenda Miller. Originally published in The Sun.

When I introduced the hermit crab assignment, I used Miller’s essay as one of my examples for the class, along with Randon Billings Noble’s “The Heart as a Torn Muscle,” which uses a medical prescription form to present an essay in which a woman contemplates cheating on her partner (Noble). I projected the essays on my classroom screen and read them aloud, and my students were, dare I say, “transfixed”?—at any rate, they were a far more rapt audience than normal.

I then set them loose on their laptops to go on a search for “hermit crab shells” that they might like to begin play-ing with for the next essay. Some students immediately had an idea in mind and needed very little support in finding their crab shells. Others struggled with this rather strange assignment I’d given them, but because we began the search in class it was fairly easy for me to consult with them in the moment to provide guidance. I did this by opening a dialogue about what topic they wanted to address, since topic choices are often more comfortable and more accessible to students than genre choices. Then, once students homed in on a topic, I was able to suggest a variety of genres/forms that might serve as appropriate shells. This particular group of students comprised a “normal” level first-semester composition course—not remedial, but also not advanced (i.e., no one in the class had an ACT score that would allow them to skip the first semester course at my university). The student population at my institution is primarily regional, working class, and first generation.

It was clear as I circled the room that day that my students were far more invested in and intent upon beginning this essay than they typically were at this stage, and I was impressed with the variety of forms they selected to use as their “shells”—everything from marriage vows written to a bride named “Regret” to a roommate contract between a young woman and her two roommates, “Anxiety” and “Depression,” to a divorce decree that severed the relationship between one student and her stubborn sinus infection, to an “animal surrender form” from the Humane Society that one student used to surrender her extremely difficult and high-maintenance best friend. This assignment would have been far more difficult in the pre-digital era, but today all of these standardized forms and thousands more

I projected the essays on my classroom screen and read them

aloud, and my students were, dare I say, “transfixed”?—at any rate, they were a far more rapt

audience than normal.

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are accessible and downloadable so that students can easily capture them, mimic their form, and manipulate them to serve their essays.

The energy level was high on those initial in-class writing days that involved brainstorming for ideas and searching for formats; as I suspected, the writing itself proved far more challeng-ing once students had to truly wrestle with the challenge of adopting a tone other than their own while maintaining metaphorical/analogous consistency. My expectations, to be frank, were somewhat low; hermit crab essays are fun but diffi-cult, and most of these students had never

written anything other than a five-paragraph essay. None of them were English majors or minors, nor did they have any training in creative writing from high school. I was prepared to grade leniently and kindly, recognizing that I was asking students to do something difficult and that at least they were reaching and breaking out of formulaic and limiting writing habits. But when the final essays came in, I was pleasantly surprised and sincerely impressed in more than a few cases. Not only were the majority of the texts well developed and ambitious in terms of what they had attempted, but the students’ ability to mimic syntactical structure and tone far surpassed what I thought they were capable of.

One young man who works summers in a metal fabrications factory wrote a syllabus titled “Surviving Factory Work 201,” which is not only impressively thorough and nuanced but dryly funny. He casts his foreman as the course’s In-structor and develops, over the course of the essay, a rich and cohesive character with personality and depth.

Course Materials > “Bring your brain every day.” (Different than “Common Sense,” Instructor’s

personal favorite) > Ability to withstand insults and criticisms (Another Instructor Favorite) > Ability to withstand intense use of profanity (Yet again another Instructor Favorite) Optional Materials: > Love for classic rock (Heavily preferred) > Lighter (Although you may not smoke, many people presently employed do;

offering a light will help get on their good side.) > Working through breaks (Heavily encouraged to work through your 9:30am-

9:45am paid break and 12:00pm-12:30pm unpaid lunch.) > Understanding of the concept of being “paid by the hour and not by the job” (Work

at a steady pace and don’t try to do everything in one day.) (DeSmidt 1)

The energy level was high on those initial in-class writing days that involved brainstorming for ideas and searching for formats; as I suspected, the writing itself

proved far more challenging once students had to truly wrestle

with the challenge of adopting a tone other than their own

while maintaining metaphorical/analogous consistency.

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Failure to answer the questions in a timely and correct manner will result in failure of the exam and the student will be subjected to brief but intense ridicule before being retaught the lesson. The amount of ridicule will be based on the mood of the instructor depending on the day and the standing of the student with the instructor. If the student is in good standing with the instructor, the ridicule will be swift and friendly. If the student is in poor standing with the instructor, the ridicule will be lengthy, harsh, and brought up at random times during the coming week. After the appropriate amount of ridicule and re-teach-ing of the lesson, the student will be offered a chance to retake the exam. If the student again fails, the instructor will become angry and intensely ridicule the student before telling them to watch as he finishes most of the project. (DeSmidt 2)

Another student wrote a series of Craigslist “Missed Connections” entries that addresses her biological father, beginning with the day she was born and end-ing with her first day of college. She plays with voice and tone, adopting the casual and light-hearted style typical for this popular Craigslist column, while addressing content material that is serious and sometimes heartbreaking. The first entry reads:

Dec 23—Hello! Today is the day I was born. I heard you were supposed to be at Saint Mary’s hospital? My mom told me you were really busy and couldn’t make it. But I just wanted to get to know you. I realize you’re busy with the restaurant; you see it as your child. But now you have a real baby. Why weren’t you there? Tell me who I’m named after, so I know it’s you. (Gorenchan 1)

An entry from her early teenage years, without getting overly detailed or melodra-matic, introduces a darker consequence of these “missed connections”:

April 11—Hi. I went out with a guy today. I know you told me a hundred times before to be careful, but I was reckless. I trusted him too much and he drugged me. Slipped something into my drink. I’m scared. I’m at the hospital right now and you’re here. I’m sorry. My vision is blurry and I can’t walk, but I see you there. Please don’t be mad. Tell me the nurse’s name so I know it’s really you. (Gorenchan 1)

One of the final entries demonstrates a degree of healing and resolution while still maintaining the themes of abandonment and loose ends.

Sept 5—I started college today. I know it’s not the one you wanted me to go to. But I’m happy here. I just want you to be happy for me. I hope you’re proud. I know I messed up in high school; you didn’t even think I’d make it into college, but here I am! Are you proud?! I’ve been making so many new friends and doing so well in my classes. I know education is really important to you . . . it’s really the only thing we’ve ever really talked about. Please tell me the university you really wanted me to go to, so I know it’s you. (Gorenchan 1)

A successful hermit crab essay is dependent upon the writer’s ability to imitate, a writing tactic that tends to make both expressivists and process-based pedagogues cringe. Most contemporary pedagogies consider imitation a bad word,

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equating it with squelching students’ natural voices and co-opting the writing process itself. There is a rich and well-documented history of imitation-as-meth-od-of-teaching-writing, however, whose roots are traced back to ancient Rome (Murphy 36).

Paul Butler, in an article titled “Imitation as Freedom: (Re)Forming Student Writing,” claims that “the most damaging aspect of formalism’s fall from grace is the way imitation has been ignored by the field, hidden in composition’s dark

closet because of disinterest and disdain” (25). He recalls his own development as a young academic writer and how being required to imitate various forms “gave me the freedom to develop ideas by offering a form for me to imitate, a model from which to structure my own essays.” Butler further suggests that “valuable imitative approaches should be used widely and unapologetically in the

composition classroom,” and claims that “restoring imitation to the composition classroom . . . is a creative practice that has the paradoxical effect of liberating, rather than enslaving, students.”

This is what I intended to facilitate in my students by way of the hermit crab assignment, and at least in terms of unleashing creativity and helping my students write with intentional voice and tone, it seemed to work. However, as I’ve previously mentioned, they did not retain that confidence, engagement, or flow when it was time to begin writing with sources. The frustration of reading their first attempts at research integration was intensified because I experienced it in the immediate wake of the success and enthusiasm that characterized the hermit crab assignment. Because of this sharp contrast and because the hermit crab technique was so fresh in my mind, it occurred to me that there might be a way I could leverage what students had done on their hermit crabs and use it as a bridge to more scholarly forms of writing.

I created an “academic hermit crab” assignment. I gave students the “shell” (form) and asked them to create the “crab” (content). These are the steps I employed:

1. I assigned an immersion journalism essay, in which students were required to blend a narrative of their own first-person experience (they were allowed to choose the experience) with expert commentary in the form of scholarly articles, interviews, court documents, and so forth. For example, one Chris-tian student spent the day with a Muslim family and discussed the differences and similarities between faith practices; the research he selected ranged from editorials about the effects of Trumpian political rhetoric on American Mus-lims to scholarly articles about the parallels between the Bible and the Koran. Another student who self-identifies as a conservative male attended a campus meeting of our university’s feminist group; his research included interviews from the women in the group as well as scholarly articles.

It occurred to me that there might be a way I could leverage

what students had done on their hermit crabs and use it as a bridge to more scholarly forms of

writing.

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2. Once students had completed their experience and chosen their source material, I asked them to come to class with the source material. I told them only that we’d be completing an in-class writing task.

3. At the beginning of class that day, I complimented my students on their hermit crab essays, for which they’d already received grades, and clearly stated my observation that they’d demonstrated a solid ability to mimic structure and tone in their writing. I then explained that I now wanted them to use those exact skills to write an “academic hermit crab.” I then handed out an assignment sheet that is reproduced below, in which I coded the various ele-ments of research-integration that we’d previously discussed in class:

Source Integration Practice

Write 3 source integrations that you could potentially use in this paper, using the 3-step quote integration method we’ve discussed in class. Remember that you only need to “credential” a source the first time you cite it.

Using the sample below, mimic the structure, syntax, and tone with your own topic and sources. Italic: preview Roman: citation (summary, paraphrase, or quote)Highlight: follow through

Most people assume Amish teenagers live a strict Christian existence in which they never do anything wrong; however, this is an incomplete picture of Amish teenage life. Marlene Yoder, a 22-year-old Amish schoolteacher and the eldest of eight chil-dren, explains how the tradition of “Rumspringa” serves “to provide a space for rebellion while also ensuring that young people ultimately decide on their own to commit to the church for life” (2008, p. 89). It is this particular combination of effects that makes the custom so controversial. According to Yoder (2008), rather than being a true opportunity for self-discovery, Rumspringa is actually intended to scare teenagers back to the church. She describes her own experience as a 16-year old girl and argues that “it only looks like a choice. In reality, you get thrown into a world that’s so big and so frightening almost everyone goes back to the church just because it’s easier and more comfortable” (Yoder, 2008, p. 94). If Yoder’s claim is accurate, it calls into question whether Rumspringa is a tenet of faith or an exercise in manipulation. Sociology professor Angela Baker believes it’s the latter. Baker (2014) claims that Amish parents willingly cast their children into English society precisely because they know how terrifying it is; they are able to disregard their children’s behavior during Rumspringa because they know that it is only a matter of time before the teens will choose Amish baptism and a life in the church (p. 357). If Baker is correct and the decision to remain Amish is coerced rather than chosen, then the 90% “success” rate of Rumspringa looks more like institutionalized child abuse.

This could also be given as a homework assignment, of course, but I expe-rienced a few benefits of making it an in-class activity. The classroom provided a quiet and distraction-free environment with a set end time (one hour and twenty minutes, in this case). Surprisingly, most students actually focused on three para-

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graphs for the full hour and twenty minutes, which seems considerably longer than they might have spent at home. At the beginning of the class, I made a point that it should take that long, that quality was more important than quantity today, and that I wanted them to practice careful writing that was thoughtfully checked and polished before they submitted. I think this served to demonstrate the complexities inher-ent to academic writing; students are so accustomed to “glossing over” texts—the ones they read as well as the ones they write—that many of them simply haven’t yet grasped the inherently messy, time-consuming, and frustrating experience that academic writing can be. Many students also encountered various tricky citation situations, and because I was right there they were able to consult with me in real time and implement the changes immediately.

The responses varied from student to student, but overall I saw a marked improvement in “first attempt/first draft” research-based writing than I’ve seen in similar student groups before I tried this tactic. A very typical response to the academic hermit crab is evidenced by Zoe’s writing below (this is one of the three required paragraphs):

Many Tribal schools have the reputation of not focusing in on the different First Nations cultures, due to the professors of whom are not culturally competent. This then leads the problem of many First Nations people not attending, or simply “white washing” themselves. Leander “Russ” McDonald, researcher and new president of United Tribes Technical College, explains the start of his effort to make United Tribes Technical College an institution that brings awareness of culture to the professors which then rains down upon the students, “We are not here to make white men out of our students, we are here to help make educated American Indians and for them to retain and be proud of their culture as they move forward in regard to their education.” (2014). This new push for cultural competency will bring together a raise in acceptance and success. (Betancourt)

Her prose is not perfect, of course; there are passages that could be smoothed out or written more professionally and efficiently. But she’s making the correct moves: she leads into the discussion with her own words, introduces and credentials her source, incorporates the quotation, and then follows through with her own interpretation of why the referenced material is relevant to her thesis. From this point, I can address the finer details of punctuation, syntax, etc.

There are other ways beside hermit crab essays to employ imitation as a method of teaching academic writing. They Say/I Say, for example—Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein’s wildly popular first-year comp text—does an excellent job of providing useful templates to teach students how to integrate research. But like many composition instructors—especially those of us who serve working-class students—I abandoned all textbooks years ago because of how much they cost. And for someone like me who is moving increasingly away from process-based and traditional composition pedagogies, the hermit crab essay serves as an effective bridge from creative to academic writing.

My student evaluations (which are anonymous) seem to substantiate that students found the assignment productive, including statements such as, “I found

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the hermit crab essay to be extremely dif-ficult . . . From writing this essay, I learned that I can adapt to writing something I am not comfortable writing”; and “From this [hermit crab] essay, I learned that there are many different ways to write. Many ways that, until this class, I didn’t realize were available.” Students learned that they were, in fact, capable of choos-ing and producing a style of writing appropriate to the task at hand, even if it was not something that seemed immediately accessible or appealing to them. If learning to integrate and cite research was more effective with the hermit crab exercise than through a more traditional approach, it might be due to two factors that Finer isolates in her article on genre transfer: explicitness and metacognition (316). Because the form of research integration was made “the thing” itself in this exercise, and because students were so aware that it was the thing itself, they may have been able to “reflect more explicitly toward transfer” (Finer 316) in a way that encoded the learning experience more deeply than if they had perceived research integration as just one more in a long list of items they had to focus upon, such as grammar or proper formatting.

There were also students who resisted the assignment, who would have preferred to either cleave to the forms they’d used in the past or to move more directly into straight-up academic writing. On the whole, though, the hermit crab essay provided an enjoyable and productive classroom experience in first-year composition.

Works cited

Anderson, Chris. “Late Night Thoughts on Writing and Teaching Essays.” The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction, edited by Robert Root and Michael Steinberg, Allyn and Bacon, 1999, pp. 245–51.

Betancourt, Zoe. Excerpt from in-class writing assignment, 2017.

Bishop, Wendy. “Suddenly Sexy: Creative Nonfiction Rear-ends Composition.” College English, vol. 65, no. 3, 2003, pp. 257–75.

Bloom, Lynn Z. “Creative Nonfiction: Is There Any Other Kind?” Composition Studies as a Creative Art: Teaching, Writing, Scholarship, Administration. Utah State UP, 1998, pp. 88–103.

Bourelle, Andrew. “Creative Nonfiction in the Composition Classroom: Re-thinking Antithetical Pedagogies.” Journal of Teaching Writing, vol. 27, no. 1, 2012, pp. 37–65.

Students learned that they were, in fact, capable of choosing and

producing a style of writing appropriate to the task at hand, even if it was not something that seemed immediately accessible or

appealing to them.

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Butler, Paul. “Imitation as Freedom: (Re)Forming Student Writing.” The Quar-terly, vol. 24, no. 2, 2002, pp. 25+.

DeSmidt, Jack. “Surviving Factory Work 201.” 2017.

Finer, Bryna Siegel. “The Genre Transfer Game: A Reflective Activity to Facili-tate Transfer of Learning.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College, vol. 44, no. 3, 2017, pp. 315–28.

Graff, Gerald, and Cathy Birkenstein. They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing. 3rd ed., W.W. Norton, 2016.

Gorenchan, Ally. “Craigslist Missed Connections.” 2017.

Gutkind, Lee. In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction. W.W. Norton, 2005.

Hesse, Douglas. “Who Owns Creative Nonfiction?” Beyond Postprocess and Post-modernism: Essays on the Spaciousness of Rhetoric, edited by Theresa Enos et al., Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003, pp. 251–64.

Lopate, Phillip. The Art of the Personal Essay. Anchor, 1994.

Miller, Brenda. “The Shared Space between Reader and Writer: A Case Study.” Brevity, 7 Jan. 2015, Brevitymag.com. Accessed 7 Jan. 2015.

Murphy, James J. “Habit in Roman Writing Instruction.” A Short History of Writing Instruction: From Ancient Greece to Modern America, edited by James J. Murphy. Routledge, 1995.

Noble, Randon Billings. “The Heart as a Torn Muscle.” Brevity, 8 Jan. 2015, Brevitymag.com. Accessed 8 Jan. 2015.

Tobin, Lad. Reading Student Writing. Boynton/Cook, 2004.

Whetham, Jennifer Locke. “The Textbook’s the Thing: Re-Emphasizing Creative Nonfiction in First-Year Composition.” Teaching English in the Two Year Col-lege, vol. 36, no. 3, 2009, pp. 257–67.

Jennifer Young is an assistant professor of English and director of the first-year writing program at University of Wisconsin, Green Bay.

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