How, in the darkest times, do we grow in ways not possible in the light?

Join Western Slope writers Amy Irvine and Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer at the historic Wright Opera House for an intimate evening of music, story, poetry, song and conversation.

To open the evening, we’re delighted to welcome local guitarist and songwriter Jack Haight. Amy and Rosemerry have been friends for over 20 years, having met when their children were infants. Two decades later, both women have accomplished the impossible—surviving the gravity of motherhood and managing to still remain artists. In fact, the creative impulse itself is what allowed them to not only endure but to thrive. Amy’s newest memoir, Almost Animal: Motherhood, Wildness and the American West, explores the rewilding of one woman who lost herself entirely to the challenges of an outback life and her child’s mysterious illness. Rosemerry’s newest collection of poems, The Wonderment, is a love letter to the world, reminding us that even the most wrenching moments carry seeds of beauty, healing and grace. Equal parts intimate and universal, humorous and heartfelt, Amy and Rosemerry’s presentation invites us to revel in kinship and our common humanity. Door prizes available to all who come.

Amy Irvine is a sixth-generation Utahn who descends from the first Mormons to occupy the west. Her latest book, Almost Animal: A Memoir of Motherhood, Wildness and the American West was released in November 2026. Her memoir Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land received the Orion Book Award and the Colorado Book Award; her work has also earned the Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award. Her second book, Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness, is a feminist response to Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, and during lockdown, Pam Houston and Irvine coauthored the epistolary Air Mail: Letters of Politics, Pandemics, and Place. Irvine’s essays have appeared in both The Best American Science and Nature Writing and The Best American Food Writing, as well as Orion, Outside, High Country News, and Backpacker. She lives and writes on a remote mesa in southwest Colorado. www.amyirvine.com

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer has written and shared a poem a day since 2006. Her daily poems can be found on her blog, A Hundred Falling Veils. A daily, curated audio version is available on The Poetic Path, on the Ritual app. She co-hosts Emerging Form (podcast on creative process), Secret Agents of Change (a surreptitious kindness cabal), and Soul Writer’s Circle. Her poetry has appeared on A Prairie Home Companion, PBS News Hour, O Magazine, Washington Post’s Book Club, on Carnegie Hall stage, and on river rocks she leaves around town. Her most recent books are The Wonderment, The Unfolding, and All the Honey. Her spoken-word albums include Dark Praise and Risking Love. As poet laureate for Evermore, she helps others explore grief and love through poetry. Her three-word mantra: I’m still learning. If limited to one word: Adjust. She loves singing with the radio—or with silence. You will almost never catch her wearing clothes with a pattern.