James Navé
My fascination with the spoken word movement begin at the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee, in fall 1981. As I sat in the audience listening to the stories, I began to think, “I could do this too!” And I did. Here's the twist. Instead of choosing stories, I chose poetry.
The first poem I memorized was “Ulysses” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, a poem my mother recited to me when I was a boy. While the entire poem is powerful, two lines have influenced me the most: “I am a part of all that I have met” and “for my purpose holds to sail beyond the baths of all the western stars.”
Starting with “Ulysses,” I developed a repertoire of twenty memorized poems. This inspired me to co-found Poetry Alive!, a theater company dedicated to performing traditional poetry as theater. My business partner, Bob Falls, and I presented our first two-hour show on August 15, 1984, at McDibb’s in Black Mountain, NC.
Word spread, and by 1990 Poetry Alive! was national, with teams of poets performing over a thousand shows a year. By then, I’d memorized over 500 poems and was becoming increasingly interested in my own work as a writer and poet. In 1991 I sold my shares in Poetry Alive! to Bob.
Things moved fast. I started performing internationally, working in public radio, teaching speech and presentation seminars, and, for the pure fun of it, competing in the Poetry Slam--competitive performance poetry judged like a diving match.
I competed actively for eight years. I was on three national Poetry Slam teams, and won a slam with a perfect 30 at the Green Mill in Chicago, the launch pad of the slam. I’m featured in the award-winning documentary Slam Nation and, having retired from competition, I’m the Slam Master for the biannual Leaf Poetry Slam at the Lake Eden Arts Festival (www.theleaf.com).
My poetry has appeared in the North Carolina Literary Review, the Asheville Literary Review, Summit Magazine, the Taos News, Chokecherries, Heartstone Journal, The Dirty Goat, River Oak Review, Schuylkill Valley Journal of the Arts, Willard and Maple, Red Wheelbarrow, Phoebe, Tightrope, Griffin, South Carolina Review, and Poetry Slam Redux. I hold an MFA in poetry from Vermont College.
In 1995, Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way, invited me to co-produce and co-teach the Artist’s Way Creativity Camp in Taos, NM, which we offered yearly until Julia moved back to New York in 2001. In summer 2002, Allegra Huston and I offered a hybrid creativity/writing retreat which eventually grew into the Imaginative Storm Writing Workshop. In addition to our annual Imaginative Storm workshop in Taos, we've hosted workshops in Paris, London, Galway, Singapore, Bangkok, Manila, Asheville, and Savannah.
Allegra and I lead an annual Imaginative Storm retreat for screenwriters at the Huston School of Film and Digital Media at the National University of Ireland, Galway. In 2007 I taught a weeklong seminar in the Oklahoma Scholar-Leadership Enrichment Program (OSLEP) at the University of Oklahoma, and I have presented writing workshops and performances throughout the U.S., as well as in international schools in Europe, Africa, Asia, and South America. I have also conducted Imaginative Storm creativity workshops for companies including Adidas, Timex, Ogilvy, Frito-Lay, Mida Foods Manila, and the North Carolina Outward Bound Schools.
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