THE
WORKSHOP
An 8-Week Personal Essay Workshop for High Schoolers
The forty-seven half-written drafts in your notes app. The caption you rewrote four times and deleted.
You have something to say. You don't know what it is yet.
The Workshop is where you find out.
The Approach
The personal essay starts somewhere small — something you can't stop thinking about, a memory, an obsession, a question you've been circling for months without knowing why. You write without knowing where it's going. And somewhere in the writing, something opens up. You find out what you actually think.
The more specifically it's yours — your exact memory, your particular obsession, your one way of seeing — the more universal it becomes.
The Workshop is eight weeks of following that thread until you have a finished personal essay — and the knowledge of what you actually had to say.
How It Works
YOUR STUDIO
BOARD
Your own section of the shared digital studio board — where you pin lines that stopped you in an essay, images from a session write, fragments sitting with you. Not full drafts. Just the things that felt alive. By Week 4, you'll look at your section and start to see the thread.
YOUR
NOTEBOOK
A shared Google Doc — just you and your Studio Guide. Where your writing lives: prompts, returns, drafts. A private channel between you and the person reading your work.
THE
PRACTICE
Once a week, a prompt lands in your Notebook. You write — 15 to 30 minutes, without cleaning it up. Later, you return: pull one line that still feels alive and write from there. The return is always where the interesting stuff lives.
THE
VOICES
Starting in Week 2, you read personal essays — writers who made something true by following a specific obsession all the way. You pin what stopped you to the board. When you arrive at the live session, you can see what stopped everyone else.
THE
SESSION
Every Tuesday, the full cohort meets on Zoom for 60 minutes. The session opens with a thread from what the room noticed. We read an excerpt together, then write together. A few students share. Everyone following the same prompt, arriving at completely different places.
THE
READ
Before every Tuesday session, your Studio Guide reads your Notebook and your board — and walks in knowing where you are. Her notes are waiting in your doc: what the piece is doing, what it's still finding, where to look next. She's not editing your voice. She's helping you hear it more clearly.
The first session is about the form and the method. What the personal essay actually is. What writing-as-thinking means in practice. You write in session and you hear where the same prompt took everyone else. Nothing to prepare. You come in, and you start.
Starting in Week 2, you're reading and writing. Each week you read a personal essay by a writer who found their way to something real by writing toward it, and pin one thing that stopped you to the board. You write to a prompt and return to it later. By Week 4, you've written six or more pieces — and something clicks. You look back at everything and name the thread.
You write your first full draft — an attempt at following the thread all the way through. Your Studio Guide reads it before the session and leaves notes in your doc. By the end of Week 5, you know what the piece is doing.
Now you're making something. Your Studio Guide reads drafts and leaves notes before each session. In Week 7, you bring your piece to a partner and hear what they took from it. Something that started in your head lands with someone else — in your words.
The Workshop closes with a Share — the full cohort reading their work to each other. The room already knows you. They've been in the same sessions, writing at the same time, building toward something alongside you.
You read your piece. They listen. Then someone else reads theirs. No judges, no grades — just the work, and the voice it arrived in.
What Does a Workshop Essay Look Like?
An essay built around a single image you keep returning to — the way light moved, a photograph of someone, a place you haven't been able to stop thinking about. You don't know why it won't leave you alone. By the end, you do.
An essay about something you've never been able to fully explain caring about — a musician, a film, a decade, a game you played as a kid. You write into it until you understand what caring that much says about you.
An essay that doesn't move in straight lines — scenes, images, and moments that seem unrelated until suddenly they click. The shape isn't linear.
About Your Studio Guide
Kate Arillo has spent her career on every side of creative work — making it, teaching it, and seeing it in students who were still figuring out what they had to say. She's taught writing at the high school and college level and spent a decade in art school admissions reviewing thousands of student portfolios and projects. She built The Studio because she kept meeting students with something real to make — and nowhere serious to make it.
BFA Film/Video · MA English · Former Director of Admissions · Secondary Teaching Certification
More about Kate →For Parents
The Workshop is a focused, structured program led by an experienced educator. The writing your student does here is entirely their own. Their Studio Guide doesn't edit their voice — she asks the questions that help them find it.
Most students arrive having never encountered the personal essay as a form. They leave with a new relationship to writing — not as something performed for a grade, but as a way of finding out what they actually think. And a finished essay that is entirely, specifically theirs, read to a room that was doing the same work alongside them.
Outside of the Tuesday session, students spend about 1–2 hours writing across the week. In Weeks 2–4, add 20–30 minutes for reading the assigned essays.
Questions? kate@thestudio.studio — answered within 48 hours, Monday through Friday.
The Details
Tuition
$700 Founding Cohort Rate (standard rate $850 starting Spring 2027)
Dates
8 weeks · September 15 – November 3, 2026
Sessions
Tuesdays, 4:00–5:00 PM Eastern
Format
Live on Zoom + async on Miro and Google Docs
Cohort size
Up to 12 students
Open to
Grades 10–12. Motivated 9th graders welcome to apply.
TUITION & PAYMENT
Tuition is collected in full upon acceptance. Your card is authorized when you submit your application and charged only if you're accepted.
CANCELLATIONS
More than 30 days before the start date: 75% refunded. 14–30 days before: 50% refunded. Fewer than 14 days before: no refund.
Once the Workshop is underway, we're unable to offer refunds. If something unexpected comes up, reach out directly — in genuine circumstances, a credit toward a future cohort may be available.
To cancel, reply to your acceptance confirmation email.
Fall 2026 cohort forming now.
You don't need a writing sample or prior experience. You need to be someone who writes — even loosely, even privately — and wants to find out what you actually have to say.
Applications reviewed on a rolling basis.
Interested but not ready yet? Leave your email to stay in the loop on future cohorts and programs.
You're on the list. I'll be in touch.
Also From The Studio
The Workshop and Residency are where you make the work. The Audit is where your college application gets a real read.
The Residency
For the student who has a project — a documentary, a podcast, a zine, a portfolio — and wants a dedicated creative community and studio structure to actually build it.
Opens Spring 2027 →The Audit
An admissions reader's honest take on your college application materials — what a committee would actually see, where the voice is working, and what the most important moves are before you submit.
Learn more about The Audit →