Birth of the Storm
In his long poem, Lonesome Pine Special, Charles Wright wrote:
What is it inside the imagination that keeps surprising us
At odd moments
when something is given back
We didn’t know we had had
In solitude, spontaneously, and with great joy?
James Navé performed Wright’s poem regularly as part of Poetry Alive!, an organization he co-founded in 1984 which took teams of performance poets into schools across the United States. Then, as now, teachers were looking for ways inspire students to write, not because they had to, but because they wanted to. Navé knew that exciting the imagination was the best way to do this. Inspired by Wright’s poem, he designed a workshop which became the basis of the Imaginative Storm.
Students enjoyed the spontaneous word combinations that emerged when they stormed their imaginations. When they read their work, they were especially surprised by the enthusiastic applause of their classmates.
The Imaginative Storm idea spread. Navé began to facilitate workshops in universities, at writing conferences, and for corporations. Then, one snowy February evening in Boulder, Colorado, Navé attended a workshop facilitated by Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way. Cameron was intrigued by Navé’s Imaginative Storm technique, so he invited her to attend one of his presentations. Impressed, she invited him to help her produce the Artist’s Way Creativity Camp in Taos. They co-hosted the weeklong retreat from 1995 until 2001, when Cameron moved to New York.
The following year, Navé founded Taos Creativity Retreats and invited Allegra Huston to join the staff. In 2004, we renamed the event The Imaginative Storm Writing Salon. In 2009, we simplified this to The Imaginative Storm Writing Workshops or, for short, The Imaginative Storm.
The Imaginative Storm is founded on improvisation: verbal, written, and observational. Our goal is to excite the imagination, to open possibilities, to delight in the strange combinations that make life, and human beings, so consistently fascinating. We begin with the freedom of imaginative chaos, and move toward form - while keeping the imagination free to play within the various shapes of written language. We create a safe place for experimentation. We prize wildness. We appreciate the spark and fire in one another’s work - and in our own.
Navé and Huston have conducted Imaginative Storm workshops in Thailand, the Philippines, Ireland, France, Charleston SC and Asheville NC, as well as their yearly flagship event in Taos NM. Every November we travel to Ireland to conduct a three-day workshop for the screenwriting students at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and a further one-day workshop for the students in the Creative Writing program. We have also presented the Imaginative Storm as part of the OSLEP graduate seminar program at Oklahoma University.
We are available, as a team or individually, to conduct workshops at educational institutions and corporations. Please contact us at info@imaginativestorm.com.
