Ready to Hit Send?

An Editor’s Guide to Preparing Your Essay for Publication with Leigh Hopkins

What makes one personal essay impossible to put down while another never quite lands? In this 90-minute workshop, I’ll draw on years of reading and editing hundreds of essays for KHÔRA Magazine to share what I look for as an editor. Using published essays from a range of sources, we’ll look at the choices that create connection and momentum: openings and endings, structural decisions, voice, and the small moves that separate an essay that’s “almost there” from one readers can’t put down.

We’ll also talk about when to break the rules, especially when your work is difficult to categorize, structurally unpredictable, or personally revealing in a way that might be uncomfortable for you and your readers. Essays like this can be hard to place, but each of these qualities can become a real strength with the right treatment.

Bring a draft you’re considering for submission to a publication or even an idea that hasn’t quite taken form. The goal of this workshop is to help you understand what your work is trying to do, on its own terms, and help you make it as strong as it can be before you let it go.

Workshop time: September 29, 2026 from 3:00-4:30 pm EST

Zoom link will be provided. Can’t make it live? This call will be recorded for playback.

Participants will receive a  15% discount on “Tell Me Everything: A Six-Week Personal Essay Workshop.”

Questions? Email info@vivainstitute.com.

Image credit: Cy Twombly, “Untitled (Grottaferrata) III” (1957), wax crayon and lead pencil on squared paper, 1 of 7 drawings: 21.6 x 29.9 cm (each) (© Galerie Karsten Greve, St. Moritz, Paris, Köln)

Leigh Hopkins is a writer, editor, and Director of Viva Institute, an educational platform advancing creativity, consciousness, and collective repair. As curator and editor of KHÔRA Magazine, Leigh has selected and edited hundreds of works by writers and artists whose work pushes creative boundaries. For ten years, Leigh was the lead workshop leader for Corporeal Writing’s flagship body-centered writing courses. Following the publication of her essay “The Brazilian Healer and the Patron Saint of Impossible Causes” in Longreads, she was featured in a Brazilian documentary by the investigative film crew that first exposed the crimes of John of God. Leigh’s writing has appeared in BOMB Magazine, Longreads, McSweeney’s, and The Rumpus, among others, spanning memoir, essays, political commentary, fiction, and arts and culture interviews.