Trying Shells on For Size: Exploring the Hermit Crab Essay Led by D. Nolan Jefferson

Saturday, November 13th & 20th | 12 AM ET - 3:00 PM ET

Tuition | $100.00

Capacity: 12 Storytellers

The hermit crab essay is a special kind of creative lyric essay in which the form—the shell—can take on many forms: A recipe, a crossword puzzle, GPS directions, eyewitness accounts, a police report. In these highly creative essays, the form dictates the structure of the narrative on behalf of the writer. One can use this style as a kind of scaffolding for the essay, a framework with which to work within, or they can go hard in the paint, utilizing and inhabiting the shell of the crab to the extreme. In Trying Shells on For Size, a 2-day workshop, we’ll explore these found forms and push past the traditional essay, finding ways to encapsulate our personal lived experiences.

About the Faculty: D. Nolan Jefferson is an academic librarian and writer based in Washington, D.C. His prose appears in Tahoma Literary Review, Orca Literary, SFWP Quarterly, Hobart Pulp, TriQuarterly, the anthology Fat and Queer, and a finalist for contests at Indiana Review. He is an AWP Intro Journal Project Award winner, a Kimblio Fiction fellow, and a Lambda Literary fellow, holding degrees from San Diego State University, Art Center College of Design, and Louisiana State University. He enjoys tacos, collecting records, and fellow introverts. He tweets @geekandahalf.

Like all RWW offerings, this space is for Black, Indigenous, Latinx/e, Asian, and other Storytellers of Color only. BIPOC Storytellers are centered here, exclusively.