Description
In Beauty and In Sorrow:
Writing Poems as a Tool for Meeting the All of It
A Workshop with Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Every experience in life is worthy of our careful attention—and poetry provides a way to meet each experience with wonder, and a willingness to witness the ever-unfolding story of our own lives and the story of our world. Though a poem can’t change the facts, it can change the way we meet the facts, and this can change everything.
Together we’ll read poems, converse about them, use them as launching points for our own writing and talk about process. We’ll explore playing with metaphors and paradox, letting curiosity lead us past the edge of what we think we know into new possibilities for framing a moment. We’ll be less interested in writing something perfect and more interested in discovering our own stumbling blocks and epiphanies.
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer BIO:
Devoted to helping others explore creative practice, Rosemerry is co-host of Emerging Form, a podcast on creative process, co-founder of Secret Agents of Change (a surreptitious kindness cabal), and co-leader of Soul Writers Circle. She directed the Telluride Writers Guild for ten years and co-hosted Telluride’s Talking Gourds Poetry Club for another ten years.
She teaches and performs poetry for mindfulness retreats, women’s retreats, teachers, addiction recovery programs, scientists, hospice, literary burlesque and more. Clients include Camp Coca Cola, Craig Hospital, Business & Professional Women, Deepak Chopra, Think 360, Ah Haa School, Desert Dharma, Well for the Journey, and the Women’s Dermatological Society.
She performs as a storyteller, including shows in Aspen at the Wheeler Opera House, at the Taos Storytelling Festival, Page Storytelling Festival and the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, TN. Her TEDx talk explores changing our outdated metaphors. For five years, she performed in the Telluride Literary Burlesque.
She has been writing a poem a day since 2006, posting them since 2011 on her blog, A Hundred Falling Veils. In 2023, her poems can be heard daily on the Ritual app, The Poetic Path. Favorite themes include parenting, gardening, ecology, love, science, thriving/failure, grief and daily life.
She has 13 collections of poetry, and her work has appeared in O Magazine, A Prairie Home Companion, PBS News Hour, American Life in Poetry, on fences, in back alleys, on Carnegie Hall Stage and on hundreds of river rocks she leaves around town. Her poems have been used for choral works by composers Paul Fowler and Jeffrey Nytch and performed around America. Her most recent collection, Hush, won the Halcyon prize. Naked for Tea was a finalist for the Able Muse Book Award. Other books include Even Now, The Less I Holdand If You Listen, a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. In 2023 she released All the Honey; Beneath All Appearances an Unwavering Peace(a book for grieving parents with artist Rashani Réa); a book of writing prompts, Exploring Poetry of Presence II; and Dark Praise, a spoken word album with Steve Law.
She’s won the Fischer Prize, Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge (thrice), the Dwell Press Solstice Prize, the Writer’s Studio Literary Contest (twice) and The Blackberry Peach Prize. She’s widely anthologized including Poetry of Presence, How to Love the World, The Path to Kindness, Send My Roots Rain, Come Together: Imagine Peace, Dawn Songs, and To Love One Another.
She’s been an organic fruit grower, a newspaper and magazine editor, and a parent educator for Parents as Teachers. She earned her MA in English Language & Linguistics at UW-Madison. One-word mantra: Adjust. Three-word mantra: I’m still learning.
PRAISE FOR ROSEMERRY
SATURDAY, SEPT 13TH
10:00 am – 2:30 pm (w/ 30 minute lunch)
$50
(Limited scholarships available)
