From Feeling to Form: Shaping Personal Experience into Essays with Lekey Leidecker
Workshop facilitator, Lekey Leidecker, The Lekha Team— Yana and Pauline, along with the workshop participants.
The From Feeling to Form workshop, held on July 20th, 2025, was an online workshop designed to explore the journey of transforming personal experience into a written essay. Led by Tibetan writer Lekey Leidecker, the workshop guided participants through the intimate process of translating emotions, memories, and embodied experiences into a coherent narrative that can be shared with others.
The session was built around a central question: How does a feeling — something lived through the body — become an essay? Writers often grapple with the gap between what they feel deeply and what they can articulate on the page. This workshop sought to bridge that gap by offering insight into one writer’s creative process, while also equipping participants with tools to begin shaping their own essays.
As a Himalayan writer, Lekey’s practice embodies a voice that is too often overlooked in the wider literary landscape. At Lekha, we believe that writing workshops are not just about developing craft but also about amplifying communities whose experiences go underrepresented and undocumented. By centering a Tibetan writer’s work on identity, belonging, ancestry, and grief, From Feeling to Form highlighted the richness of Himalayan perspectives and the urgency of creating space for them in contemporary writing.
Through close readings, interactive discussions, and reflective exercises, participants engaged with key ideas in personal essay writing, including:
Writing from the Body: Understanding how emotions live within us, and how writing can act as a way to name and translate these sensations into language.
The Personal Essay as Expanded Poetry: Exploring how lyricism, rhythm, and voice create a bridge between lived experience and narrative form.
Messy Beginnings and Drafting: Embracing imperfection in first drafts, and learning how clarity and shape emerge through revision.
Process over Perfection: Recognizing that there is no single or “ideal” writing process — only the process that allows you to write.
Essays as Prisms: Viewing essays not as total accounts of an experience, but as prisms — refracting one moment or emotion into a form that resonates with others.
The workshop was led by Lekey Leidecker, a Tibetan writer whose essays have been widely recognized for their lyrical depth and capacity to hold complex emotional truths. Her writing speaks to experiences of grief, exile, and belonging, and her work continues to broaden the space for Himalayan stories in contemporary literature. Drawing on her own writing practice, she offered participants both practical advice and creative inspiration.
Interactive Reflections: Participants were encouraged to share their own writing challenges and insights, creating a lively, participatory environment. By reflecting on their personal experiences alongside Lekey’s essay, they gained a better sense of how to start, sustain, and refine a piece of life writing.
Practical Application: Rather than focusing solely on form or theory, the workshop offered an “inside-out” perspective — beginning with lived experience and moving outward toward an essay that could exist in the world.
The From Feeling to Form workshop was an enriching and generative experience for participants. It not only demystified the process of personal essay writing but also emphasized the value of writing as a way to connect with self and community. Most importantly, it served as a reminder of the importance of nurturing Himalayan and other marginalized voices — communities that continue to be underrepresented in mainstream literary spaces.
By equipping young writers with tools to tell their own stories and creating platforms to publish them, Lekha is committed to preserving, amplifying, and celebrating the voices of the Northeast, the Himalayas, and beyond.
