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.