Welcome to Twice 5 Miles Radio. I'm your host, James Navé.
I'm going solo this week to talk about a subject my creative collaborator, Allegra Huston, and I have spent five years mapping: imaginative intelligence, the improvisational faculty I believe everyone is born with, running beneath conscious thought, the way a heartbeat runs beneath a life.
I lay out the imaginative storm methodology Huston and I built over two decades of teaching writing together, and draw a sharp line against artificial intelligence — one manufactured, the other, as I put it, "the HTML coding we were born with."
Along the way, I stand at a refrigerator covered in word magnets, rearrange them into an accidental poem, then build an improvisational poem from a list of found phrases — soft serve, seagulls, a third lamppost, a crow under a car in the driveway. I answer a set of interview questions on the origins of my partnership with Huston and what most people get wrong about their own imaginations.
A solo meditation on writing what you don't know, and trusting the mess to find its own form.