Wednesday, January 7, 5-7 p.m. M.T.
On Zoom, recorded
hosted by Evermore
$15
When we lose loved ones, writing can be a powerful tool for helping us remember them, helping us re-encounter the world without them, and helping us re-know ourselves as the loss transforms us. In this two-hour online program, Evermore Poet Laureate Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer will offer a few suggestions for writing. Together, we will read poems about grief and discuss them. We will have chances to do our own writing, there will be optional time for sharing what we wrote, and we will have time to reflect on the effect writing has on us.
The poems we read and write won’t be able to hold all the feelings, but they will offer us a way to touch our grief, to connect with the lives and deaths of our loved ones, to give voice to our anguish, to find compassion for each other, to fall in love with the world that is left, to express our heartache, and to explore the landscape of our hearts. Sliding Scale.
If you need an angel ticket or have any questions, please contact jena@evermore.org
Please note that your confirmation email with your link for the workshop will come from Zoom. To register, visit HERE.
Archive for December, 2025
The Mystery of Grief: Writing into the Loss
Posted in Uncategorized on December 31, 2025| Leave a Comment »
Dressing Up as Flora
Posted in Uncategorized on December 31, 2025| Leave a Comment »
for Lisa
Especially in dark days,
I need these rooms of play
like tonight when with glue guns
and fake leaves we turn ourselves
into wandering vines and remember
our own inner wildness, the untamable
energy that pulses and hums us.
Draw leaves on my cheeks
and twist leaves round my wrists.
Weave leaves in my hair until, covered
in vines, I can no longer forget
how easily joy roots and rises inside us,
twining and tangling with the joy of others.
It is alive in us, green and vigorous.
Especially in these dark days, I feel it,
how joy grows us toward the light.
One on the Way to the Airport
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged driving, memories on December 29, 2025| 2 Comments »
mama and I drive through
a desert of memories,
sometimes these old arroyos still flood
Writing to Meet Grief
Posted in Uncategorized on December 29, 2025| 2 Comments »
January 7, 2026
7-9pm ET, 6-8pm CT, 5-7pm MT and 4-6pm PT
Zoom, recorded, $15
When we lose loved ones, writing can be a powerful tool for helping us remember them, helping us re-encounter the world without them, and helping us re-know ourselves as the loss transforms us. In this two-hour online program, Evermore Poet Laureate Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer will offer a few suggestions for writing. Together, we will read poems about grief and discuss them. We will have chances to do our own writing, there will be optional time for sharing what we wrote, and we will have time to reflect on the effect writing has on us. The poems we read and write won’t be able to hold all the feelings, but they will offer us a way to touch our grief, to connect with the lives and deaths of our loved ones, to give voice to our anguish, to find compassion for each other, to fall in love with the world that is left, to express our heartache, and to explore the landscape of our hearts. To register, visit HERE.
In Honor of Kyra Kopestonsky
Posted in Uncategorized on December 28, 2025| 16 Comments »
Baking Cake on Dec. 27
Dear Kyra,
Here you are in the scent of chocolate beet cake
that lingers in the kitchen hours after the cake is done—
as if the world conspires to prove how something
we can’t see or touch can still be so present.
I remember the first time you made the recipe for us—
how outrageous it seemed to add roasted beets to a cake.
Now it’s our favorite, dark and rich with deep pink frosting.
Every time we make it, we think of you. Like tonight.
As Vivian and I bake a birthday cake for Timothée Chalamet,
we celebrate his life even as we mourn your death.
Isn’t it always all of it all at once? For days,
I’ve been lighting candles for you in the windows,
letting time blow them out. Tonight, I trace
your handwritten notes on the recipe with my fingertips—
like using less sugar and subbing coconut oil for butter,
plus suggestions for how to make the frosting more fancy.
I feel as if you’ve left handwritten notes in my heart—
like bake more cakes, substitute kindness for annoyance,
plus suggestions for how to make music in the hardest times.
I don’t know how it works, but if you can make a wish,
these candles are for you. I will keep lighting them.
It’s dark, my dear, and your life is still so bright.
—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Dear friends,
My beloved friend Kyra Kopestonsky died on Dec. 23, 2025, at 5:25 p.m. of complications due to breast cancer. She was one of the most kind, generous, loving, peaceful, humble, creative humans I know. In dozens of my books, she’s left me little love notes over the years. She would make our family certificates for sweet and silly things, and we have them hanging on the wall. She made us strange and lovely new foods–like chocolate beet cake–and would leave them labeled in our fridge. She was a talented musician who used to play piano for a living, then left that work to be more of a vagabond, traveling with her cello and playing roadside and on mountainsides. She accompanied me on so many trips to play cello with me as I performed poetry, and for many years she was the host of the “Poetry Drop Box” beside the highway–a way for people to exchange poems. She would play cello on top of people as a way to heal them, and for my birthday, she would always play me a Russian death song–haunting and minor and slow. Being Kyra’s friend is one of the greatest gifts of my life. May we all carry a bit of Kyra’s love light and shine it forward into the world.
Below are links to other poems about her–and here is a link to her official obituary.
https://ahundredfallingveils.com/2020/02/26/olfactory/
https://ahundredfallingveils.com/2020/01/18/how-to-slice-open-an-avocado/
https://ahundredfallingveils.com/2017/11/03/on-my-birthday-a-death-song/
https://ahundredfallingveils.com/2025/01/29/stage-4/
https://ahundredfallingveils.com/2024/09/14/before-turning-toward-light-again/
https://ahundredfallingveils.com/2019/02/05/one-friendship/
https://ahundredfallingveils.com/2025/12/24/lit/
The Dream Rink
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged inclusion, KC Trommer, party, roller skating on December 27, 2025| 4 Comments »
I didn’t know how much I needed
KC to invite me to her roller skating party
at Roll On America until today, when
she told me she wanted me to come.
The party was over four decades ago.
I didn’t know her then, and the rink
has long since been demolished,
but somehow my inner twelve year old
got the invite and jumped up and down
and ran circles around my inner rooms
pumping her arms in the air, shouting,
Yesssssss! All afternoon I felt her
bobbling on her faux suede tan roller skates,
chasing after KC who can tuck and skate
right between other people’s moving legs.
The Steve Miller Band has been singing
nonstop in my head about heating up and going
round and round, and I want to send invites
to every single kid who has ever felt excluded—
those kids still hurting somewhere inside
so many of us. There’s room for us all
at the dream rink. What a party we’re going to have.
Noel, Noel
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Christmas, family, harmony, singing on December 26, 2025| 8 Comments »
for Diane
Though my fingers fumble through
the joyful and triumphant chords,
though the notes are too high
for me to sing without stridence,
and though Diane’s alto is no longer
steady as it was over twenty years
ago when we began this Christmas ritual,
still we snuggle side by side
on the black lacquer bench
and harmonize through the deep
and dreamless sleep and the child
who shivers in the cold, we sing
of hopes and fears of all the years
and though we are clumsy and stilting
and downright not good, we are singing
through the darkest part of the year,
through this tender time for us all.
The light of an ancient star shines inside us.
And as we stumble, we laugh and
sing that light back to the world.
Six Glimpses of Christmas Eve
Posted in Uncategorized on December 25, 2025| 4 Comments »
old wound—
I touch it
with new grace
*
crescent moon—
aligning my lips to its tip
to sip straight from the mystery
*
faint scent of pine—
memory of when we were
the whole forest
*
sitting together around the table—
almost weeping at the simple gift
of sitting together around the table
*
wrapping gifts at midnight
the darkness helps me
tie the last bow
*
I despise anchovies—
knowing you love them,
they are my favorite present
Lit
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged kyra on December 24, 2025| 6 Comments »
for Kyra
Tonight when I light the candle
and say your name, I notice
how you have lit me—
with your words, your voice,
the way you clap your hands
at the smallest of joys.
Because you’ve given me
light you’ve gathered from
the darkest of places,
I will never be the same.
Again and again, you have lit me
as if my life is beeswax
and love is the wick and
your courageous life is flame.