Writing Through The Mess:
Becoming Community Through Play
February 21-23, 2025
Friday, February 21st, 2025
Leading with Love: Writing as a Practice to Keep the Heart Opening
An intergenerational playshop.
In a time of ugliness, isolation and fear, how might we meet our own heartache with curiosity—not to absolve those who hurt or harm, but to keep ourselves from hardening. In this two-hour writing playshop, we will not fix anything, but we will practice showing up with curiosity, wonder, and a devotion for telling the truth. What does it mean to belong here? What does showing up to a blank page have to teach us about how we might show up with the rest of the world?
Time: 11:30 A.M. - 2:00 P.M.
Location: At Room One
Free event, but registration required
Limited to 15-20 LGBTQ+ valley folk.
Saturday, February 22nd, 2025
Your Backyard: Belonging to the Land
A morning workshop.
Whether you’ve lived in the Methow Valley for two months or eighty years, this place has changed you and made you who you are. How does it influence the way you see the world? What thrills you about it? What keeps you here? What makes you want to leave? In this two-hour poetry playshop, we’ll read and write poems that help us explore our relationship to this place we call home.
Time: 10:00 A.M. - 12:00 P.M.
Location: At the Winthrop Library
Free event, but registration required
Limited to 30 people (60+ years or older, please)
Saturday, February 22nd, 2025
Public Reading
A reading by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Sometimes the aching heart must go dancing. Join Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer in an evening of poetry, storytelling, song and conversation that explores the wonder, beauty and paradox of living wholeheartedly. We’ll travel to places simultaneously somber and playful, brokenhearted and uplifting, even solemn and sexy as Rosemerry wades heart-deep in the broken world and finds in the rubble honest, surprising invitations to fall more deeply in love with the world.
Time: 6:30 P.M.
Location: Trails End Bookstore
Free event, no registration required
Sunday, February 23rd, 2025
Real Life, Real Play: Writing Who We Are Together
A reading and writing workshop
What magic might happen when we gather on the playground of a blank page? No writing experience necessary—just wonder and willingness. Together we’ll read and write poems that invite the imagination and embrace the wildness and raw humanness of our own stories. A wondrous chaos might ensue.
Time: 2:00 P.M. - 5:00 P.M.
Location: Room One
$25 Registration
Open to all ages | Limited to 30 people
No previous writing experience necessary for all sessions, you don’t even have to like poems. You don’t even need to bring a pen and paper—unless you want to. We’ll provide everything, including a space for you to be curious. Sharing will be optional. Laughter will be inevitable.
A statement from the artist…
I believe poetry can help us meet the most difficult moments of our lives. It doesn’t make things easier. It offers no answers. It fixes nothing. But it does offer us a way to connect with each other, to give voice to our fears and hopes, to find compassion for each other, to fall in love with the world that is here, to find solace in community, to express our heartache and to explore the complex landscape of our hearts. I have witnessed firsthand how essential the arts can be for showing up in a time when everything in us wants to shut down. I know how reading and writing poetry has helped me to open, to grow, to find beauty in a landscape of heartbreak and devastation, and to find a path forward when no path seems possible.