First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.
In this episode, Mitzi talks to Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer about her new poetry collection, The Unfolding.
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From the episode:
Mitzi Rapkin: So, in one of your poems, toward the end, you say how strangely wondrous life can be after a loss. And I’m wondering if you can talk about feeling that, and then also feeling that as a writer.
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: Okay, so there’s a beautiful example of it, right? Of that full spectrum of that paradox, how strangely wondrous life can be after a loss. And I do think that there are ways that having lost my son just over three years ago, my father three months after that, that allowing myself to go deeply into that loss and turning toward it or finding myself be as open to it. I remember my prayer, the constant prayer I had at that time was open me. Open me. I just wanted to feel it all. I wanted to feel it, and feel it, and feel it, and feel it, and feel it. And I think then this idea of, how do we find what’s wondrous after loss is a surprise. I don’t know that I ever knew that was a possibility, not with a loss this deep, and I think that’s the value of a practice every day of showing up. I have a daily writing practice. And I think the practice of showing up every day and being met with small wonders in a daily way, in some ways, made it possible for me, in a time of great loss, to still be open to the wondrous. It didn’t hurt that I’m surrounded by poets who helped along with that also, right? I think that I had an enormous support group who came alongside and also have a practice of meeting this wide spectrum of feelings. But what I didn’t know until I did, was that you could be just sobbing and see something beautiful at the same time and experience them both, and that you could be extremely happy and in that moment of great joy, all of a sudden, have that moment where you remember, Oh yes, I did this with that person that I’ve lost and now this sense of great grief that shows up in the middle of this moment of great joy, and how they sing together and seem to call to each other and inform each other and open each other even more. I like to think of it as this is how we create this sense of spaciousness inside of us, or I should say, maybe more to the point that it’s created inside of us. I don’t know that there’s any agency to it, but that wrestling, of those two very opposite things, I just feel like, if they’re wrestling inside, is like they just keep pushing everything back until there’s more and more and more space from inside.
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Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer has been writing and sharing a poem a day since 2006—a practice that especially nourished her after the death of her teenage son in 2021. Her daily poems can be found on her blog, A Hundred Falling Veils, or a curated version (with optional prompts) on her daily audio series, The Poetic Path, available with the Ritual app. Her poetry collection Hush won the Halcyon Prize. Naked for Tea was a finalist for the Able Muse Book Award. Her most recent collections are All the Honey and The Unfolding. In January 2024, she became the first poet laureate for Evermore, helping others through this platform to explore grief, bereavement, wonder, and love through the voice of poetry. She is the co-hosts of a podcast on creative process called Emerging Form.
