Gateless Academy Luminary Spotlight

What Kind of Writer Are You?

 FREE! One powerful hour to finally find answers, support and an in-depth, intimate understanding of how to identify the genre that is right for you as a writer.

Wednesday, October 2, 2024 • 1:00-2:00 pm ET, On Zoom

About the Session

When Daisy Alpert Florin first entered the Gateless Writing community, she did not know that she was a novelist. In a wild exploration into non-fiction that arced into a mastery of the elements of craft and story, she became an internationally acclaimed novelist, whose work has been hailed by some of the greatest literary minds of our time. 

In this luminary call, Suzanne and Daisy will illustrate how everything from journal pages to the seemingly insignificant moments of your life can be leveraged into a book that has been loved by the best media outlets and even some of the Hollywood greats. You will learn what it takes to make it into the hands of a high-profile agent, why it’s important to create a writing community and what it looks like to say “yes” to the genre that is calling, even if it surprises you.

About Daisy Alpert Florin

Daisy Alpert Florin is a two-time alum of the Gateless Academy and a Gateless-trained teacher. She is the author of the novel My Last Innocent Year (Henry Holt & Co. 2023). The book was hailed by The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, Town and Country, Booklist, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, People Magazine and many more. Her work has appeared in Full Grown People, Motherwell Magazine, Brainchild Magazine; Kveller; and Under the Gum Tree, among other publications. She is a recipient of the 2016 Kathryn Gurfein Writing Fellowship at Sarah Lawrence College and was a 2019–20 fellow in the BookEnds novel revision fellowship, where she worked with founding director Susan Scarf Merrell.

Lands like a refreshing, deep breath… My Last Innocent Year is a heartfelt chronicle of a writer who realizes that her stories about girls with feelings matter every bit as much as the ones written by the guy who annotates The New Yorker. ~ Elisabeth Egan, The New York Times Book Review

About Suzanne Kingsbury, Founder, Gateless Writing 

Suzanne Kingsbury is the founder of Gateless Writing, a worldwide literary arts organization based on the principles of ancient Zen and creative brain science. Gateless Retreats, the Gateless Academy, the Gateless Teacher Training and her personal mentorship have been catalysts for writers who have found themselves on bestseller lists, represented by New York’s most coveted literary agencies, acquired by the bastions of publishing and profiled by the largest media outlets in the world.

Suzanne was awarded a Fulbright scholarship in her mid-twenties to study Buddhism in Sri Lanka, where she found the link between meditation, creative writing and neuroplasticity. In her late twenties, Suzanne was invited to study novel writing with Frank Conroy, then the director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, who encouraged her to quit her job and commit her life to writing. She went on to win the Oxford Town Fiction Prize, and her first two novels were published by Scribner, reached bestseller status, were translated widely abroad and optioned for film.

Suzanne received her MFA in Creative Writing and the Literary Arts at Bennington College where she studied the confluence of ancient Zen and creative brain science and created Gateless Writing, a method and a movement that pushes through creative blocks to a landscape of unprecedented creative genius, and helps writers reach the zenith of their power on the page. Suzanne’s work has been profiled in The Guardian, Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone (European edition), People Magazine, O Magazine, Ms. Magazine and many more.

She lives and works on the coast of Connecticut and runs Gateless Teacher Trainings and Retreats for writers all over the world. She considers her home anywhere that Gateless Writers live and write.