Rosemerry at TEDxPaonia: Art of Changing Metaphors

30 Apr Rosemerry at TEDxPaonia: Art of Changing Metaphors

We claim her, so we name her.

Telluride’s Word Woman is Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer.

The Telluride Literary Festival describes Rosemerry as one of its notorious “Burl Gurrls,” an elite sorority that includes other red hot poets: Amy Irvine, Kierstin Bridger, and Ellen Metrick. (For more on Lit Fest 2016, May 20 – May 22, including Literary Burlesque featuring Rosemerry and friends, go  here.)

Not just a laureled poet-storyteller – though her talents there would be more than enough – Rosemerry is also a songbird and long-time member of Telluride’s seven-woman a cappella group Heartbeat.

With Art Goodtimes, she co-produces the monthly poetry smack down, the Telluride Institute’s Talking Gourds Poetry Club.

And from time to time, Rosemerry teaches at Telluride’s Ah Haa School for the Arts.

All the world – certainly our world – is her stage.

Rosemerry is also a regular contributor to Telluride Inside… and Out’s Poets’ Corner. (For past poems, just type her name into Search – little magnifying glass – on the Home Page.)

Plus, the lady is a happily married mother of two and a knock-out, eye candy.

Green with envy?

Join the crowd.

But perhaps, just perhaps, it is a better idea to change up that metaphor: instead of green with envy, could we loose the negative frame and think of Rosemerry as a bright shining star in the Telluride galaxy, filled with superstars that also includes you and me?

“What a different result one gets by changing the metaphor!”

The above quote from George Eliot (“The Mill on the Floss”) perfectly frames Rosemerry’s TEDx talk, aptly named “The Art of Changing Metaphors.”

Rosemerry delivered her pearls  – we are what we believe and feel through the metaphors that guide our lives – on February 6 at the Paradise Theatre in Paonia. TEDxPaonia is first place on the Western Slope to host live speakers. (TEDxTellurideLive streams two days of the main event. More on that here.)

“I so very much believe in what I am talking about that I want lots of folks to see the talk. I’ve gotten such great feedback from people about how they are incorporating it. Gosh that feels great.”

Or as Wallace Stevens framed it in his The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination: “Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.” 

Watch Rosemerry’s talk for clues– and a new lease on life here.

That same day, another speaker, Rosemerry’s friend and professional colleague Christie Aschwanden, bookended Rosemerry’s talk with hers on the subject of envy.

Watch Christie’s talk here.