Talks at Tahoe: Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, Meeting the Tides of Life Through the Practice of Poetry

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Join us at the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe for Talks at Tahoe: Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, Meeting the Tides of Life Through the Practice of Poetry.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer writes a poem every single day guided by the question "What is the truest thing I can say right now?" This simple daily practice of honest presence has sustained her through the most devastating tragedy a parent can know—the death of a beloved child—and enabled her to grow to become a beacon of hope, compassion and resilience for thousands of readers.

In this program, Rosemerry will read selections from her new book, All the Honey, and join the audience in a conversation about how to meet life in all of its paradoxical facets, exploring how creativity can alchemically transform the pain of profound loss into a source of brave beauty that calls us into deeper relationship with all that is.

“The title of the book is a nod to how all the honey in the world comes from two opposites—the sweetness of nectar and the bitterness of the pollen that feeds the bees,” Rosemerry says. “Those extremes are both found in this book—poems that explore extreme grief and astonishing beauty.” On that note, the book contains both very playful poems (like Mr. Clean coming to seduce women in their kitchens) and also poems that explore the first raw and fragile days after the suicide of Trommer’s teenage son, Finn.

“At first I didn’t think both kinds of poems could inhabit the same pages,” Trommer says, “and then I realized, ‘Of course, they can. Because that is what we as humans are asked to do—to inhabit worlds of great joy and great despair at the same time.’”