Some Thoughts on Writing Hermit Crab Essays

By Laurie Easter

During a recent AWP conference panel on the lyric essay, Angie Chuang, Heidi Czerwiec, Sayantani Dasgupta, and I read excerpts of our essays appearing in Randon Billing Noble’s A Harp in the Stars anthology and talked about how we came to our forms. My essay, “Searching for Gwen” is a hermit crab essay in the form of a word search puzzle. What follows below are the thoughts I shared on the panel:

When I first tried to write about the subject matter in “Searching for...