Meet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer lives with her husband and daughter 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) and was a finalist for Colorado Poet Laureate in 2019.
Devoted to helping others explore their creative potential, Rosemerry is the 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 also directed the Telluride Writers Guild for ten years and co-hosted Telluride’s Talking Gourds Poetry Club.
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 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 Her TEDx talk explores changing our outdated metaphors.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, ecology, love, science, thriving/failure, grief and daily life.
She has 12 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 Miracle Already Happening, The Less I Hold and If You Listen, a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. In April 2023, Samara Press will release her next collection, All the Honey.
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 anthologized in Poetry of Presence, How to Love the World, The Path to Kindness, Send My Roots Rain, What Wildness Is This, Come Together: Imagine Peace 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’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.
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”