Joshua Tree 2024 Participants
Casey Valentina is a free-spirited, heart-and-body-centered, purpose-led creative and entrepreneur. She is devoted to living a soulful life, and inspires others to do the same.
Kelly Anderson: I’m an academic HIV physician, but I’ve always been drawn to intuitives and naturalists – people who understand something deeper about the world we live in, and can help unshackle the rest of us from the hustle and grind. I love to write elements, myth and literary love stories. I’ve guided thousands of women doctors through writing experiences at Understory (understory.me), my non-profit designed to bring women doctors back into their instincts. My writing has appeared in many books, including The Surprising Lives of Small-town Doctors (2016) and Pursuing Health (2018). I’ve published in Academic Medicine (2012), the Journal of Adolescent Health (2013), Social Medicine (2014), the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry (2014) and the Canadian Journal of Rural Medicine (2012 and 2018), amongst others. I’m an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, teaching about community, ethics and belonging for over a decade. I spent my childhood on the beaches of British Columbia where most of my stories unfold.
Carly Lederer is an artist from Frederick, MD. Occasionally considered the Swiss Army Knife of her generation, Carly has been the Office Manager of an HVAC company, the Public Relations Manager at a landscape company and garden center, and managed trainers at a fitness facility where she ran 100 person boot camp classes and did one-on-one personal training. After COVID, she was the Operations Manager at a local coffee roaster and eventually started her own business operations assistance company, where she helps local businesses handle any task they may not have the capacity for.
Volunteering in Frederick led her to Rotary International and a passion for experiencing the world through connections and service. Her main goal in life is use her vibrant creativity and authenticity to serve communities in other cultures and bring consciousness to the connection we have with other humans all over the world.
Blessings, I’m Taryn Marie Rose. For the past 30 years, I have immersed myself in the study and embodiment of sacred healing and creative arts, exploring realms such as Gnostic wisdom, metaphysics, mysticism, and holistic health. This deep exploration has shaped my work as a Quantum Healing Hypnosis Practitioner, Astrologer, Sacred Embodiment Mentor, and Holistic Wellness Practitioner.
I am dedicated to guiding individuals in connecting with their higher selves, aligning with their soul’s purpose, and realizing their fullest potential. My passion extends to creating transformative spaces through women’s retreats and community offerings that inspire healing, connection, and empowerment.
Karen Joy Brown has loved writing ever since her first poem penned in third grade. She’s a long time singer/songwriter with honest, literate lyrics focusing on love, loss, and a deep affection for beauty hidden in mundane life. As a recovering high school Spanish teacher and religious fundamentalist, her current memoir project seeks to transmute the challenges of knowing one’s own mind and forging a truer life with compassion, humor, and tenacity. Along with a former bandmate, she’s developing a podcast and business for singer-songwriting creatives, Supernova Support, that applies Gateless magic to overcome the fear and doubt keeping songs trapped inside.
Casey Erin Wood is a writer, coach, energy healer and founder of the Ruby Slipper School of Magic, where she helps women own their magic so they can change the mother-trucking world.
Casey has helped hundreds of women step into their ruby shoes and realize they’ve always had the power. Her work has been featured in places like HuffPost, The Muse, Scarry Mommy and The New York Times.
When she’s not championing women to shamelessly change the world, you’ll find her killing her darlings in her (oh-so-soon-to-be-finished) memoir, plotting (yet another) trip to Ireland or bingeing her latest television addiction (hint: anything with crackerjack character development).
Casey lives on the shores of Georgian Bay with her multiple-hat-wearing husband, her unabashedly sassy teenage daughter and her two very badly behaved French Bulldogs, Gus and Mabel.
Chris Young spent 24 years working in high tech as a User Experience Design Researcher. She’s been laid off eight times. In 2016, she thought she was at the top of her game, she checked herself into a psych ward, where they kept her for a week. She’s writing about how, in America, workaholism is a dangerous badge of honor when we over-identify with our professions, as illustrated by how she de-identified just enough, literally going crazy to stay sane, told in memoir. Family and friends who intervened on her behalf are relieved that she’s been in therapy ever since. She is excited to embark on this next phase of her career, becoming a serial memoirist and a Gateless Trained Teacher. Connect with her here.
KR Sukeforth writes books and comics for teens and adults. She grew up on the coast of Maine, where she devoured a full buffet of Stephen King, folklore, and more than her fair share of off-the-boat lobster. After earning a double degree in dramatic literature and film from New York University, she worked in theater, film and television development, and digital marketing before moving back to New England to write the stories that won’t leave her alone. When she’s not writing, you can find her surfing ice-cold Maine waves and hanging with her husband and spunky bordoodle pup.
Ritu Hasan is from Orange County, California. She is Reiki Master and former banking attorney. She is in the process of completing her first book.
Heather Bartos (aka Kiki, Stella Athleta or any number of nom de plumes) longs to write in a lighthouse on the coast of Maine, instead of the hot AF Texas kitchen she uses now. She identifies as a physical and energy healer (one a day job, the other a passion). She has 1 husband, 2 kids, 3 horses, 4 chickens, 2 cats, 3 dogs and a donkey named Eleanor. She’s coming to Gateless training with no preconceived notions, a very blunt and direct inner critic and a wicked desire to howl under the moon with fabulous women.
Mariska Montgomery:
Trailblazer
Storyteller
Poet
Visionary
Aquarian
Daughter
Mother
Lover
Support
Renata Rokicki is a fiction writer and was part of the very first Gateless Writer’s Academy. Thereafter she became trained in Gateless with the class of 2016. Since then, she has been at the helm at Gateless retreats, where she is the backbone and the talent that makes retreat the incredibly inviting, beautiful experience it is. She is back this year, at the 2024 Gateless Training as our celebrated chef. Renata has spent the past few years as the Executive Chef at Café Birdie in LA. Her work as a chef has been praised by The New York Times, The LA Zagat, Open Table and much more. We are so grateful and happy to have her in our midst this fall. Thank you sweet, wonderful, amazing Renata!!!
Me: Suzanne Kingsbury is an award-winning, internationally noted author, whose work has been translated widely abroad and optioned for film. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Award, an Oxford Town Fiction Award and has been shortlisted for the Robert Olen Butler Award, the Fog City Writer’s Award and a Dana Award.
In 2007, after graduating from the Bennington College Masters in Fine Arts program, Suzanne founded Gateless Writing, an internationally-acclaimed organization whose unique methodology combines brain science and therapeutic touch to draw out writers’ unique talent and singular genius, enabling them to move through residual blocks and create domain-changing prose. Through retreats, workshops, one-on-one intensives and career training programs, Suzanne has helped countless writers on their path to acquiring top agents, signing six-figure book deals, hitting bestseller lists and winning prestigious literary awards. Her writers have been interviewed by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and major Hearst publications, they have seen themselves on CBS, NBC and ABC affiliates, and have appeared in Forbes, USA Today, and on the Jane Pauley show.
As a writing intuit, Suzanne’s “channeling” and shamanic practices have created incredible shifts in her writers’ work and in their lives. Ultimately, she believes the urge to write is a dancing order from the divine; writers are “scribes”, and the messages they are called to write have extraordinary power to change the world.