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Ready to Hit Send: An Editor’s Guide to Preparing Your Essay for Publication

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Ready to Hit Send

An Editor’s Guide to Preparing Your Essay for Publication

with Leigh Hopkins
September 29, 2026 from 3:00-4:30 pm EST

Zoom link will be provided. This call will be recorded for playback.

What makes one personal essay impossible to put down while another never quite comes alive? 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, deeply revealing, or unruly. Uncategorizable can be a really great thing if you know how to use it.

Bring a draft you’re considering for submission to a publication or an idea you haven’t figured out how to put into words yet. The goal is to 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.

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.

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Tell Me Everything: A Six-Week Personal Essay Workshop

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Tell Me Everything
A Six-Week Personal Essay Workshop

Date: October 11 – November 22, 2026
Workshop Leader: Leigh Hopkins

This six-week workshop is for writers at any stage who are hungry to write and release a personal essay into the world. Each week we meet live on Zoom to read and discuss essays, dig into the choices that shape voice, style, and narrative arc, and then write together in real time. Instead of traditional workshop critique, I’ll show you a different way—generative feedback, given in intimate, rotating cohorts, drawing on the same process I use as a developmental editor.

We’ll draft and experiment with different ways of telling a story, and read essays together as examples of what’s possible. We’ll spend real time examining voice: what it is, how to identify when yours is really shining, and how to trust it even when the material is difficult. We’ll talk about structure and narrative arc, the glory of generative feedback, and how revision can be a tool for discovery.

Between sessions, you’ll have suggested readings across a range of essay styles and weekly assignments to keep your story moving.

You’ll leave with a complete draft and a community of writers who believe your story matters. If you know your life has something worth saying, let’s get it on the page.

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. 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.