Tell Me Everything
A Six-Week Personal Essay Workshop
Date: October 11 – 22, 2026
Workshop Leader: Leigh Hopkins
This six-week workshop is for writers at any stage who are ready to get a publishable personal essay out into the world. Each week, we’ll meet live on Zoom to read and discuss essays together, dig into the choices that shape voice, style, and narrative arc, and then we’ll write, together, in real time. You’ll learn as much from what other writers are attempting, and how they’re solving it, as you will from your own draft.
Whether you’ve published dozens of essays or you’re finding your voice as a writer for the first time, you’ll leave with a complete draft and a community of writers who believe your story matters.
Together, we’ll explore:
- drafting a story and experimenting with different ways of telling it
- reading essays together as examples of the many ways a story can be told
- voice: what it is, how to find it, and how to trust it even when the material is difficult
- structure and narrative arc, and how to build momentum and depth across drafts
- how to workshop a piece and receive feedback that actually moves the work forward
- revision as a tool for discovery
You’ll have supplemental materials to work with between sessions, including suggested readings across a range of essay styles, along with weekly assignments to keep the momentum going and get your story on the page.
This workshop is for anyone who knows the pieces of their life have something important to say, and is ready for the world to read it.
Questions? Email info@vivainstitute.com.
Leigh Hopkins is a writer, editor, and Director of Viva Institute, an educational platform advancing creativity, consciousness, and collective repair through online workshops, mentorship, and a community grounded in connection and care. As curator and editor of KHÔRA Magazine, Leigh has selected and edited hundreds of works by writers and artists whose polyphonic, multi-genre work pushes creative boundaries. For ten years, Leigh was the lead workshop leader for Corporeal Writing’s flagship body-centered writing courses. 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. 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.