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Rich Youmans

Haibun & the Hermit Crab

“Borrowing” Prose Forms

Photo by dan wilding on Unsplash

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

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

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

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

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

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Journal Entry / January 1

1)    practice patience. (in italian it's patienza.)
2)    relearn italian
3)    find in the house (check attic, closets, and basement) all 3
        editions of oggi in italia including:
        a) half-finished workbooks &
        b) cassette tapes.
        (note to self: does anyone listen to tapes besides me?)
4)    who am i kidding? note to self: you know it is: whom am i
        kidding? don't get off topic.
5)    this is too hard—throw everything out:
        i) textbooks—all 3 editions;
        ii) workbooks (w/n finished);
        iii) cassette tapes. (really do this, do not put anything back—
        use outside garbage can, not inside one!)
6)    find top 3 online italian courses.
7)    read all course reviews by real people only.
8)    compare (italian) course prices.
9)    put all info on spreadsheet. . .
        (if needed ask for help. in italian it's aiutatemi!)
10)  practice patience.

first light
a paper rose unfolds
the new year

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

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

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Blowout

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

art therapy always the same blood moon

STOP.

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

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

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Glint

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

one two three stars
I become stillness
then night

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

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

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

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

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

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About the Author

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