16 Dec Between the Covers: Author-Artist Meet ’N Greet, 12/20
Stop in at Telluride’s Between the Covers Bookstore on Tuesday, December 20, 4 – 6 p.m. for an Authors & Artists Meet ’N Greet (a nano-market of sorts, smaller than a pop-up, right?) for Happy Hour. (After that, head uptown for the celebration at the Telluride Conference Center in Mountain Village of the Gondola’s 20th anniversary.) At the BTC event, your hanging buddies include Judy Haas, Jerry Roberts, Lisa Issenberg, Kierstin Bridger, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, and Craig Childs. Unique gifts by unique locals … original art, inscribed books, good cheer. Learn more about the featured artists/artists below.
Judy Haas
Born and raised in Aspen, Judy is a well-established member of the art community, contributing her work to galleries and art events since the early 1980’s. Over the past three decades, Judy’s pastel visions of the natural world have attracted international attention, from ambassadors to major corporations such as Patagonia. A committed environmentalist, Judy uses her gifts to celebrate and preserve the wilderness she loves.
“Through my work, it is my intention to respond to the beauty uniting the trees, the sky, the stars, the animals and the planet through the diversity of creation and its inherent wholeness.”
Self -taught, Judy has been painting and drawing since she was a young child. Often times she makes the pastels she uses, imbuing her images with a richness and saturation of color that is unique.
Judy recently moved to the mountain town of Telluride, Colorado, where her exquisitely detailed trout and botanical images are still much in demand.
Judy initiated the gallery wall space at La Cocina da Luz and contributes her time and talent in mentorship programs and non-profit donations within the community.
About Judy’s book “Being a Mother: Ser Mae” in Judy’s words. (www.beingamotherthebook.com ):
This is a book that was written by a woman who raised 11 children in the Seringal Amazon forest in the 1950’s. Raimunda Ferreira da Costa and her husband, Gabriel, lived without running water or electricity. He was a rubber tapper.
She sent a letter to several women in 1999, shortly after her son, Salomão, passed away. I wanted to illustrate this letter and have it published as a book. I approached different museums to request permission to use the Madonna and child images, which I then embellished with my own art. Within the book are the original images and information about the artist. I did not use the museum names, as I was not sure about the trademark laws.
In September, I went to Porto Velho for her book launching party and her 88th birthday celebration. During that time, Raimunda fell and broke her femur. She was flown to Brasilia, where they operated on her leg. Her operation was successful, but she died the following day. I am happy to have completed this work for her, shortly before her passing. The resources generated through the first publication of this meaningful work stand as an inheritance for her children and grandchildren, offering them a better life.
The forward was written by her daughter Jandira Gabriel.
I want to see future publications in many languages. It is now in Brasilian Portuguese (her native language) and English. It is a universal message. I am looking for someone who may be interested in supporting this project in the future.
Jerry Roberts
Jerry Roberts has enjoyed a career in the weather and avalanche forecasting business for 35 years. He has forecasted for the Colorado Avalanche Information Center, Colorado Department of Transportation for southwest Colorado highways, as well as the Chilean mining industry. He has consulted and forecasted for various snow industry concerns such as ski areas, ski guides, helicopter and snowcat operations.
Jerry has provided site specific weather forecasts for motion picture and commercial projects since 1982. His latest outing was with Quentin Tarantino’s motion picture, “The Hateful 8,” filmed in Telluride.
Jerry is skilled at communicating complex meteorology phenomenon for a myriad of clients including film production crews.
“The common denominator here is San Juans forecaster Jerry Roberts, a member of the Mountain Weather Masters team. This book is a compilation of the snow forecasts he prepared for the duration of Quentin Tarantino’s locally shot film ‘The Hateful Eight.’ It doubles as a repository of his curated haikus and as a gallery of paintings by Susan X Billings. Sprinkle in the design and packaging of Lisa Issenberg. Jerry also stacks rocks for your dashboard. You have to see these amazing collaborations. They are a limited run.”
Since 1991, artist and designer Lisa Issenberg has specialized in innovative, custom metalwork, often incorporating other mediums, such as photography, wool felt, or bamboo. Her art is original and distinctive, yet drawn from its dominant influences: Bauhaus form and function, Art Deco graphics, Scandinavian design sensibility, and the grace of the mountainous world surrounding her studio headquarters. Lisa’s process incorporates both industrial techniques and handcraft; no two pieces are the same, as each is delightfully imperfect.
Susie Billings, Jerry Roberts & Lisa Issenberg, co-conspirators on Hateful Eight project, now at BTC.
Jerry & Lisa
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Craig Childs
Craig Childs writes about the relationship between humans, animals, landscape, and time. His stories come from visceral, personal experience, whether in the company of illicit artifact dealers or in deep wilderness.
Craig has published more than a dozen critically acclaimed books, including his most recent book, “Apocalyptic Planet,” which won the Orion Book Award and the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Men’s Journal, and Outside.
An occasional commentator for National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, Craig lives in Western Colorado and teaches writing for both University of Alaska in Anchorage and Southern New Hampshire University.
The New York Times says of Craig: “Childs’s feats of asceticism are nothing if not awe inspiring: he’s a modern-day desert father.”
He has been described as a born storyteller by the New York Sun, and the LA Times says his writing is like pure oxygen, and “stings like a slap in the face.”
Craig has won several key awards including the 2013 Orion Book Award, the 2011 Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award, 2008 Rowell Art of Adventure Award, and twice he has won the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award, first in 2007 and then in 2013.
Craig Childs is an Arizona native. He grew up back and forth between there and Colorado, son of a mother hooked on outdoor adventure, and a dad who liked whiskey, guns, and Thoreau. He has worked as a gas station attendant, wilderness guide, professional musician, and a beer bottler, though now he is primarily a writer. He lives off the grid in Western Colorado.
Former Western Slope Poet Laureate, Wordwoman Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer.
Poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer “is a chanteuse of the heart,” says fellow poet Art Goodtimes, (Rosemerry and Art co-host the monthly Talking Gourds Poetry Club series.)
Rosemerry served two terms as San Miguel County’s first poet laureate and worked 10 years as director of the Telluride Writers Guild. She has authored and edited 13+ books, and her work has appeared on “A Prairie Home Companion,” in O Magazine, on back alley fences, in her children’s lunchboxes, and on rocks she leaves around town. She won the ACC Writer’s Studio Poetry Contest in 2011 and 2013.
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 beloved a cappella group, HeartBeat.
Rosemerry also leads writing workshops for hospice, recovery programs, women’s groups, teachers, schools, writers groups, and people who think they hate poetry and often teaches at Telluride’s Ah Haa School for the Arts.
Rosemerry earned her master’s degree in English Language & Linguistics from University of Wisconsin—Madison.
Favorite four word mantra: “I am still learning.” Favorite one word mantra: Adujst.
“To witness Rosemerry Trommer’s myriad talents before a group and to hear her message is to restore one’s faith in humanity,” Mike Nobles, Director of “A Gathering of Writers.”’
In April, Rosemerry gave a TEDxPaonia Talk: “The Art of Changing Metaphors.”
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.
KIERSTIN BRIDGER:
Kierstin Bridger
Kierstin Bridger divides her time between Telluride and Ridgway Colorado. She was the 2011 Winner of the Mark Fischer poetry Prize and the Judge for the 2012 contest.
Kierstin has performed her poetry at Twenty by Telluride, and Sparrows Festival in Salida, Colorado. She has been a featured writer and reader at Colorado events such as the Talking Gourds Poetry Series, P-3 (Performance, Poetry & Prose) and the Sheridan Opera House, After Long Silence in Seattle, and The Stripped Launch in Philadelphia, PA.
She holds a Bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Washington and is currently pursuing an MFA in poetry at Pacific University in Oregon.
Her first major book is “Demimonde.” The dramatic, edgy, heart-breaking, heart-warming verse bring back to life the women who worked in the red light district in a turn-of-the-century mining town, the world of Telluride’s sultry, sinful past.“Demimonde” literally refers to the “half-world,” the liminal space, those women occupied. Like them, Kierstin’s words dance nimbly on the razor’s edge.
Her latest book is “All Ember”:
In lyric work that spans from the oil fields of Colorado to the hollers of Kentucky, Kierstin’s “All Ember” pulls us through the burning embers of life itself. In these poems forests and bodies sing the rhythms and offer up the vistas that life affords us all. It is a gritty and truthful ode about roots that dig deep into the earth itself.
“There is the map of who we are, and there’s another of whom we are supposed to be. But cartography is not taught to girls. So we take the wheel, hit the gas, and careen blindly past signs along the way: Slippery When Wet. Narrow Shoulder. Dead End. Suddenly we are women, unable to read the language of our own bodies, hear the tympani of our own hearts. In All Ember, Kierstin Bridger charts the course by dropping not breadcrumbs (we know how that one turned out), but hot, glowing coals. This elegant and gritty collection defies the three-part journey of the elevated, armored hero—bowing instead to daughters deep in moist forest duff, a way toward love that is not sailed, but crawled,” Amy Irvine, author of “Trespass,” winner of the Orion Book Award and the Colorado Book Award
“Bridger, crafts for us a world that is filled with the memory of youth and its long reach into adulthood. These poems are crafted by a mother, a daughter, a woman whose vision is of the interwoven, the profound, the sacred, and the impure. These poems take us from Kentucky to Colorado, from oil field to basketball court, from savory to sweet. She does what all great poets do, she moves her readers through fire, aching and fear toward healing. All Ember is, at its core, a series of odes to the body; Bridger, brings the feminine, the feminist and the female into a brilliant and inexhaustible light. Her sensory gifts are on full display in every poem; coupled with her brilliant ear, the succinct and subtle tones of these poems are unique and universal,” aaron a. abeyta winner of the American Book Award and the Colorado Book Award for Colcha.
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