The Sherbino Presents: Before Words There Were Birds: an Old Caw Medicine Show with Poetry, Storytelling, Music & more

Seated Show. Doors at 5:30, show at 6:00
$20 general admission, $18 seniors/students (under 18 or over 65) in advance. Prices go up the day of the show.

Before Words There Were Birds: an Old Crow Medicine Show with Poetry, Storytelling, Music and more, featuring consummate performers and poets Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, Wendy Videlock, Ellen Metrick and Daiva Chesonis.

Before we named the rivers or drew boundaries across the land, there were birds. They were among our first musicians, our first messengers, and perhaps our first poets. The evening takes its inspiration from ravens and crows, owls and hawks, songbirds and migrating flocks—and from the ancient human impulse to listen closely to the more-than-human world. Poems and stories will mingle with breath, rhythm, flute song, humor, silence, and the ancient rhythm of the frame drum. Join us for a lively, flighty, earthy, and unexpected journey—a celebration of birds-- not just as objects of observation, but as neighbors, teachers, and travelers who have accompanied the human story long before memory. Book Signing Afterwards.

Performers include:

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer lives in Southwest Colorado with her husband and daughter. Her poetry has appeared in O Magazine, on A Prairie Home Companion and PBS News Hour, in Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry,” on stage at Carnegie Hall, in back alleys and on river rocks. Her poetry collections include Hush (winner of the Halcyon Prize for poetry of human ecology), Naked for Tea (finalist in the Able Muse Book Award), Even Now, The Less I Hold, The Miracle Already Happening: Everyday life with Rumi, Intimate Landscape and Holding Three Things at Once (Colorado Book Award finalist). Her newest collections are The Unfolding and The Wonderment. Rosemerry co-hosts Emerging Form–a podcast on creative process, and co-founded Secret Agents of Change–a group devoted to surreptitious acts of kindness. She hosts The Poetic Path, an audible daily offering on the Ritual app, in which she shares a poem, insights, and an optional writing invitation. She was the third poet laureate of the Western Slope.

Wendy Videlock lives on the edge of a ravine outside Palisade. Her critically acclaimed work appears widely, most notably in Best American Poetry, O Magazine, The New York Times, Poetry Magazine, Hudson Review, Hopkins Review and Rattle. Her syndicated column, The Barefoot Laureat/Word from the West appears in newspapers and magazines across the four corner states. She is the two-time winner of the Keats Soul Making Award, the PTBS Sonnet Prize, the Cantor and Fischer Prize and the Rattle Ekphrastic Prize. Her newest book, Desert Kin: Speaking Animal in the American Southwest: Essays and Poems (Lithic Press). is available now. Wendy served three and a half years as poet laureate of the Western Slope. Find out more at Wendy Videlock

Daiva Chesonis was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and now lives off-grid in southwest Colorado. She has a B.A. in Russian Studies and an M.A. in Diplomacy & International Conflict Resolution. She moved to Telluride in 1992 as part of the team that built the Gondola transportation system. She stayed and became a snowboard instructor, Art Director at Telluride Magazine, and a traveling minstrel for Mountainfilm on Tour before becoming co-owner of Between the Covers Bookstore, where she co-founded the Telluride Literary Arts Festival. From 2019-21 she was San Miguel County Poet Laureate. In the fall of 2025, she and her husband Craig Childs were Writers in Residence at the Hemingway House in Ketchum, Idaho. Her poems—in translation or written in her first language—appeared in the 2025 and 2026 Anthologies of Lithuanian American Poetry. Her first book of poetry is set to publish sometime this century.

Well into adulthood and despite decades of fighting it, Ellen Metrick began to accept that she was a relatively self-sufficient jane-of-many-trades. She has taught school, run rivers for a living, made and shoveled snow, lived in her truck and a tipi, built a straw bale home with her late husband and raised a lovely, thoughtful and creative human being. She's tried to fix her lawnmower. Poetry has been her lifeblood since before she can remember. Ellen has two published books of poetry: Poetisattva (2000) and Teasing out the Divine (2012). She dabbles in creative nonfiction, writes for local newspapers and magazines and is in love. Life is good for Ellen. Except for that lawnmower.