From a pandemic elegy for three billion lost birds to a villanelle written live on air, Lorrie Wolfe on grief, precision, and the discipline of fourteen lines.

Welcome to Twice 5 Miles Radio. I'm your host James Navé.

This week, poet Lorrie Wolfe joins me to talk about the discipline behind the spark — how a stray line overheard on the radio, or a friend's invented word, becomes a finished poem. 

Wolfe, author of "The Language of Crows," explains why she works in sonnets and other tight forms, trusting fourteen lines to force clarity rather than sprawl, and why editing, not inspiration, is where precision actually happens.

We talk through her elegy for a friend lost in a hang-gliding accident, written in dialogue with Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish," and her pandemic-era poem "How Many Birds Are Enough," which asks what we owe the dead, human and otherwise, by simply speaking their names.

Navé traces his own path from performing storytellers' ballads at festivals in the 1980s to writing verse today. Wolfe and Navé both discuss how poetry is a cousin to country music. Wolfe quotes Emily Dickinson, tell the truth, but tell it slant. 

This is a conversation about form as freedom, and why brevity, done right, is its own kind of generosity.

Welcome to Twice 5 Miles Radio. I'm your host James Navé. This week I sit down with singer-songwriter Lisa Carver, who goes by her last name, in a conversation that moves from Music Row to a remote Alaskan commune and back again. Carver spent years chasing hit songs in Nashville, signed to Sony, before realizing the tailgates-and-Daisy-Dukes formula was quietly erasing the writer raised on gospel, Hank Williams, Tom Waits, and Leonard Cohen. She walked away.

Now, after a long hiatus, she's stepping back onstage, guitar in hand, ready to write from places she's always circled but never named, including a childhood spent in a religious cult that shaped her into the storyteller she is today. We talk about her ferocious story-songs, like "Whiskey and a Gun" and "Bullet," the guitar she lost to an airline and clawed back nine months later, and what she calls "the gift," that unteachable thing that lets a performer catch fire with an audience. It's a conversation about reclaiming a voice after years of writing for other people.

Welcome to Twice 5 Miles Radio. I'm your host, James Navé.

This week I'm flying solo, recording on a smoke-hazed midsummer morning in Arroyo Seco, New Mexico, and turning my unscripted, wandering style toward a single subject: improvisation.

I argue improvisation isn't a rare stage skill reserved for the bold, but a birthright I've practiced since infancy, present in every drive down a country road, every job interview, every fumbled pickup line.

Drawing on a half-remembered public-speaking class from 1970, a stumbled recitation of Casey at the Bat, and the surprisingly precise calculus of a squirrel darting across traffic, I build a working framework of four elements: narrative, agency, voice, and ease.

Along the way, I offer concrete practices- holding silence, flipping open a random book for improvisational free-association, moving my body without a plan- to help you loosen your own instincts under pressure.

Equal parts memoir, philosophy, and performance coaching, this episode is my meditation on trusting the present moment, wherever it takes you. Tune in, and see where the conversation leads.

Welcome to Twice 5 Miles Radio. I'm your host, James Navé. In this solo episode, I pull poems from decades-old notebooks and read them aloud: old highway verses, a bawdy e.e. cummings romp, and originals from my cancer-recovery collection, while explaining why I trust what bubbles up.

Recorded outdoors in Taos with birdsong and a distant tractor as backdrop, it doubles as a meditation on memory: I argue that journals endure where digital files vanish, and I offer a simple writing trick. Start sentences with "I don't remember”,  to unlock buried recollections.

I script poems into two-voice dialogues, give Little Miss Muffet the slapstick treatment, and let my index fingers argue with each other. Along the way I revisit Charles Wright's ode to Appalachian kudzu and riff on the "imaginative storm" behind my creative process.

Threaded through are stories of the Old Saluda grade and a friend I lost this week to cancer. It's part craft talk, part front-porch storytelling, and part gentle argument that everything we write, remember, and imagine becomes part of the landscape we carry inside us.

James Navé here.

I put together this eight-minute music track for a writing workshop I'm teaching at the Estelle Center in La Veta, Colorado.

Here's the invitation. Play the music and keep moving for the entire eight minutes. There are no rules. Walk, stretch, sway, dance, or simply move in whatever way feels natural.

When the music ends, sit down with a blank sheet of paper and a pen. Begin writing with the words, "I am aware..." Then keep writing for ten minutes without stopping.

See what happens.

Welcome to Twice 5 Miles Radio. I'm your host, James Navé.

What can acting teach us about poetry and living a more authentic life?

In this solo episode, I explore acting not as a profession but as a way of understanding ourselves. Drawing on decades of performing memorized poetry, studying theater, and learning from master acting teacher Susan Batson, I reflect on what it really means to create a believable character—and why the hardest character we ever play may be ourselves.

Along the way, I unpack Robert Frost's Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, examine the difference between performance and performativity, discuss public and private personas, and share lessons from a New York acting studio that continue to shape my work today.

Whether you're an actor, writer, speaker, teacher, or simply someone curious about creativity, this episode offers practical ways to deepen your relationship with language, imagination, and everyday life.

Because in the end, acting isn't about pretending to be someone else.

It's about discovering how to become more fully yourself.

In this solo episode, I explore what it means to Live Life Like a Festival, inspired by Jennifer Pickering's vision for the LEAF Festival and our upcoming book of the same title.

Along the way, I reflect on my thirty years with the LEAF Festival, William Carlos Williams' poem The Dance, my visit with my friend John Van Hasselt as he navigates Parkinson's disease in Paris, producing a surprise birthday party for my grandmother, and what spider webs, orange peels, butterflies, blackbirds, and even a bug can teach us about paying attention.

Perhaps there isn't much difference between a festival sensibility and a poetic sensibility. Perhaps joy and sorrow, celebration and tragedy, all belong to the same human gathering.

Join me for an hour of stories, poems, memories, and improvisation as we explore the possibility that the festival surrounds us—that life itself is the festival we've been living in all along.

A Paris lunch. One decision. Six books later.

What happens when a coach decides to write a book and discovers she has no idea what she's doing?

In this conversation, I sit down with my longtime friend and collaborator, Lynn Burney, to explore her remarkable journey from writing for herself to becoming the author of six self-published books.

We begin in Paris at Le Train Bleu, the legendary restaurant inside Gare de Lyon, where Lynn first announced her intention to write a book on coaching. What followed was not the book she expected to write.

Instead, she discovered the power of story, memoir, and eventually fiction. Along the way, she learned hard lessons about memory, truth, self-publishing, audience, and the difference between writing for yourself and writing for a reader.

Together, we explore pilgrimage, grief, creativity, aging, memoir, fiction, and the surprising freedom that comes from taking responsibility for your own publishing journey.

A conversation about books, friendship, and what happens when curiosity becomes a lifelong creative practice.

What if creativity isn't a talent reserved for artists, writers, and musicians? What if it's something far more fundamental—something woven into human nature itself?

In this conversation, Allegra Huston and I explore a concept that has become central to our work over the last several years: Imaginative Intelligence. We discuss why creativity may be less about making products and more about participating in a vast field of possibilities that every human being is born into.

Along the way, we talk about writing, intuition, mathematics, evolution, imagination, personal power, and the surprising ways people transform when they stop worrying about whether they're creative and begin practicing creativity as a way of life.

Drawing on more than twenty years of teaching together and five years of weekly Imaginative Storm gatherings, we examine how a simple ten-minute writing practice can awaken confidence, reveal hidden possibilities, and help people reconnect with their own imaginative lives.

This conversation is an invitation to reconsider what creativity really is—and to discover why "I don't know" may be one of the most powerful places a human being can stand.

Welcome to Twice 5 Miles Radio. I'm your host, James Navé.

In this solo episode, I take you along on a twenty-two-hour journey from Paris to Taos, New Mexico—a trip that begins with coffee, oatmeal, a forgotten iPhone, and a ride on the Paris Metro, then winds through Charles de Gaulle Airport, a transatlantic flight, immigration in Salt Lake City, and a rain-soaked drive home through New Mexico.

On the journey, I reflect on storytelling, travel, friendship, memory, artificial intelligence, poetry, and the surprising drama hidden inside everyday life.

What begins as a simple travel narrative gradually becomes an exploration of how stories are formed, not through grand events, but through observation, movement, and attention to the world around us.

I also share Alfred Noyes' classic narrative poem, The Highwayman, recited from memory while standing in an airport boarding line.

Welcome to Twice 5 Miles Radio. I’m your host, James Navé. Today my guest is Jay Hill, whose TEDx Asheville talk may be one of the funniest and most unexpectedly thought-provoking presentations I’ve encountered in years. Jay’s subject? Men sitting down to pee. Yes, really.

What begins as a provocative comic premise quickly opens into a larger conversation about responsibility, habit, fairness, emotional honesty, rehearsal, public speaking, and the strange vulnerability of standing on a TEDx stage revealing something deeply personal and surprisingly universal.

In this conversation, Jay and I revisit the rehearsal process at the old Black Mountain College barn at Lake Eden, explore improvisation, audience psychology, and the tension between structure and spontaneity. We also discuss why certain ideas stick in the mind long after the laughter fades.

Part performance theory, part social observation, part comedy routine, this episode moves from splash physics and “fluid dynamics” to existential questions about the messes human beings leave behind—and who winds up cleaning them up.