Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer lives with her husband and two children in Placerville, Colorado, on the banks of the wild and undammed San Miguel River. She served as San Miguel County’s first poet laureate (2007-2011) and as Western Slope Poet Laureate (2015-2017). In 2019 she was a finalist for Colorado Poet Laureate.
Devoted to helping others explore their creative potential, Rosemerry is the co-host of Emerging Form, a podcast on creative process (with Christie Aschwanden), co-director of Telluride’s Talking Gourds Poetry Club (with Art Goodtimes) and co-founder of Secret Agents of Change (with Sherry Richert Belul). She also directed the Telluride Writers Guild for ten years.
She teaches and performs poetry for addiction recovery programs, hospice, mindfulness retreats, women’s retreats, teachers and more. Past clients include Camp Coca Cola, Craig Hospital, Business & Professional Women, Deepak Chopra, Think 360, Ah Haa School for the Arts, Desert Dharma, Wilkinson Public Library, Telluride Literary Burlesque and Colorado Mesa State University.
She performs as a storyteller, including shows in Aspen at the Wheeler Opera House, at the Taos Storytelling Festival and the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, TN. Her TEDx talk explores changing our outdated metaphors.
She believes in the power of practice and has been writing a poem a day since 2006. Her daily poems can be found at https://ahundredfallingveils.com/. Favorite themes in her poems include parenting, gardening, the natural world, love, science, thriving/failure and daily life.
She has twelve poetry collections, and her work has appeared in O Magazine, on A Prairie Home Companion and PBS News Hour, in Rattle. com and in Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry,” on fences, in back alleys 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 by the Ars Nova Singers. 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 Miracle Already Happening, The Less I Hold (a finalist for the Colorado Book Award) and If You Listen (winner of the EVVY Award). She’s won the Fischer Prize, Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge (four times), the Dwell Press Solstice Prize, the Writer’s Studio Literary Contest (twice), The Blackberry Peach Prize, and has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize.
Since 1994, she’s been singing with Telluride’s 8-member female acapella group Heartbeat, performing jazz, folk, bluegrass and pop songs around the Four Corners region. She also sings nightly while making dinner.
Favorite activities: Trail running, Nordic skiing, recovering from trail running, camping, baking, knitting, reading, gardening. She’s been an organic fruit grower, a newspaper and magazine editor, and a parent educator for Parents as Teachers. She’s now writing a novel.
She earned her MA in English Language & Linguistics at UW-Madison. One-word mantra: Adjust. Three-word mantra: I’m still learning. www.wordwoman.com
Slipping Into Something a Little Less Comfortable: The art of changing metaphors: That was the theme of my TEDx talk in Paonia, Colorado, in February. How might you change your life (and the world!) if you could identify and change just one of the metaphors framing your thoughts? Watch the TEDx talk—and share it with your friends!
Interview with Laurie Wagner on daily inspiration and imperfectionism
Interview on Process and Daily Poems with Bill Pearse
Why Try Poetry?—DGO Magazine
On Inspiration, Egg Sacs & the Communion of Poets: interview with Kaye Lynne Booth.
Tethered by Letters
A 10-Question Self Interview in The Nervous Breakdown
A Conversation on Envy and Creativity with Christie Aschwanden
SHYFT in Perspective: A 40-minute poetry prompt class on resilience
Stubborn Praise: A reading with Rosemerry, James Crews and Danusha Laméris
Gateway to the Unknown: A free 40-minute poetry prompt class
On Play, Daily Poeming, Metaphor & More: An interview & reading on Rattlecast
It’s About Time for a Good Time: A reading and conversation with poet Jack Ridl
How Shall We Live Now? Here I read with authors Amy Irvine and Craig Childs
Pandemic Poems? Here I share three.
What Is the Role of Poetry in the Pandemic? On April 3, 2020, I did an online reading with Albert Flynn DeSilver and explored this.
Prompts for Writing in the Pandemic? I did a live class for the Ah Haa School, and here you can watch the recording.
Poetry Off the Page: I am a big fan of performance poems, and it was a thrill to win the Live Performance at BlackBerry Peach Performance Poetry Prize this year … the video of the award ceremony (and performances) is now available on You Tube.
Change Your Metaphor, Change Your Life: Alan Wartes and Issa Forrest have the most remarkable radio/video show, Interview on Metaphors and Creative Process on Think Radio, and here they interview me about metaphors and showing up vulnerably.
Interview on Poetry and Living in Telluride on Telluride TV: I was recently interviewed on Telluride TV by Elissa Dickson, and we talked of how I came to live in this remote town and how poetry shapes my life here.
Live Performance at Wellspring of Imagination 2017
Live performance in collaboration with dancers, cello, piano, poets, musicians
Live performance at Ziggies in Denver, reading from The Miracle Already Happening
Live ½ Hour Poetry Performance on Comcast Channel 54
Five-minute excerpt from Poets Co-op TV Show
Poetry discussion with Catalyst High School
Rosemerry Choreographs a Spontaneous Production of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”
Poet and storyteller Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer gets audiences to wake up and take on their own creative endeavors. She helps people find the poetry in their own lives and tell their own stories.