Writing the shy body: A textual immersion in social anxiety

TL;DRAbstract

The impulse to write often comes from the desire to express our corporeal history in words. In his memoir Winter journal, Paul Auster says '[w]riting begins in the body, it is in the music of the body' (Auster 2012: 224). His words echo those of cultural theorist Elspeth Probyn in The affect theory reader: 'Writing is a corporeal activity. We work ideas through our bodies; we write through our bodies, hoping to get into the bodies of our readers' (Probyn 2010: 76). Testifying to the lived experience of shyness in a work of personal narrative nonfiction involved an immersive exploration of the corporeal features of shyness, and an interrogation of the ways in which our emotions are experienced and inscribed in our bodies and our temperament traits are manifest in our emotional and physical responses to being in company. How, though, might we go about writing the shy body, and how do we write our bodily experiences 'into the bodies of our readers'? My memoir-in-progress, The Shyness List

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