Evoke Emotion through Body and Gesture in Narratives with Reena Shah

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Editor's Note

Evoke Emotion through Body and Gesture in Narratives with Reena Shah
Saturday, May 23
9 AM – 12 PM PT/ 12 PM – 3 PM ET
Online

In this generative craft intensive we’ll explore how characters’ bodies and gestures evoke emotions in readers. Moving beyond the dichotomy of “show, don’t tell”, we’ll read excerpts from the works of Justin Torres, Elizabeth McCracken, Sarah Thankam Mathews, and others that use physicality to both satisfying and surprising effect. We’ll look closely at the alchemy of detail, metaphor, and syntax (the structure of a sentence) to understand how these writers create intimacy with the reader, closing the distance between reader and character without collapsing it.

We’ll then play with writing exercises that place us inside our characters’ bodies. How do those bodies move in space? How do they interact with their environments, with objects, with other people, with other animals? We’ll share how these sensations, details, and small descriptions evoke emotion and interiority, and how we can discover new things about our characters when we inhabit their bodies as much as their minds. While we’ll focus on fiction, the exercises and readings apply to creative nonfiction writers, too. All are welcome!

Scholarship
The scholarship for this intensive has already been awarded.

BIO: Reena Shah is the author of the novel Every Happiness (Bloomsbury Pub, 2026), an Indies Introduce pick for winter/spring 2026 and an Indie Next title for February 2026. Her story collection, Bad Neighbors, is forthcoming in 2027. Her work has appeared in swamp pink, Lit Hub, Debutiful, Electric Literature, the Masters Review, WaxwingMagazine, Joyland, BBC, The Guardian, and National Geographic, among others. She is the recipient of a Steinbeck Fellowship, the Keene Prize in Literature from the University of Texas in Austin, a Fulbright Scholarship, and a Sustainable Arts Foundation Fellowship. For many years she was a kathak dancer with the Parul Shah Dance Company. She is a fiction editor at The Rumpus, teaches at a public school in Brooklyn, and lives in Roosevelt Island with her family.