To start things off, I ask poet, storyteller and arts entrepreneur James Navé what he lives riveted to.
“How people in communities communicate and interact with each other,” he says.
Soon it becomes clear that our whole dialogue will center on the theme of being riveted because he begins running with it like the performance poet he is. His voice is deep, his way of speaking lyrical. It lulls.
“I live riveted to movement, travel, exploration in or throughout these communities,” Navé says.
The 66-year-old tells me his whole life has been about the road. Vast memories of hitchhiking, camping, vans, large cities, small towns. These days he calls Asheville, N.C. his native home; Taos, N.M. his art home; and New York City a place he dips in and out of with his wife, Tish Valles.
“In 1984 I became riveted to poetry and storytelling, the idea of the troubadour,” he says. “I started moving around the country doing theater for school students.”
Focus was on the language, the art. Not on the highbrow aspect, but the inspiration.
This zigzagging around the continental United States is how he came to know the best ways to get from Atlanta to Seattle, or Tampa to Boston, which routes to take, where the toll booths were. In each new place, he would take long walks. As he tells me this, he begins to recite one of his poems that begins like this:
The Road
The road is in love with me. She comes turning out
of my childhood, winding through my morning,
interrupting my picnic. She insists when I’m asleep
like a kitten tapping for the door to open. I always
dream of her.
He turned the dream into reality, heeding its call, letting the thrumming beat become his life’s rhythm.
“I’m driven to do all that because I’m curious what the horizon holds,” Navé says. “That’s why it’s so easy for me to look into the horizon in Taos. It’s like I can go up into the universe and see what’s behind the stars.”
He points to a moment walking down a road. He’s 15 years old. Dressed in a London Fog jacket, a white pressed shirt from JC Penney, loafers, and slacks. It’s a Methodist Youth Fellowship gathering.
“The sun was beautiful,” he says. “The Blue Ridge Mountains were shining and green. I remember thinking this is as much freedom as anyone can have. I want this sense of freedom the rest of my life. How can I do that?”
By having a traveling life, it turns out.
What a contrast to what he saw in his father, who took the more conventional route. Working for the power company all day. Putting down his lunch box in the evening. Then he’d say, “Son, want to play a tune?” to young James.
“I’d get my guitar and he’d get his fiddle,” Navé says. “He had war wounds, some PTSD and he was sometimes unruly. When I was walking down the road that day, I thought of my father. All he really wanted to do was his music. He played with people who loved it. They came to life at night with their music.”
Every night he played
his fiddle; certain of the notes, his strings
were mockingbirds and train songs.
Navé knew he wasn’t suited to punch a clock at a 9-to-5 job. He wanted to do something he cared about. He didn’t want to feel compromised or restricted. He sensed it would have to be meaningful, something that would add value to the people around him.
“I’m not speaking from a pedestal,” Nave says regarding eschewing the conventional. “Some people punching a 9-to-5 clock love their work. My question was, could we find joy in what we do? That’s when we become riveted to life. There is a risk involved in living a life like this. I’m at a point where I have no choice. There’s nothing here but this. This is where you trust the divine.”
It felt a little like divine intervention when during a blizzard in 1995 Navé met Julia Cameron, author of the bestselling The Artist’s Way, in a Borders bookstore in Boulder, Colo.
“It was a night that changed my life forever,” he says. “That evening began what would be twenty plus years of my involvement with Julia and The Artist's Way.”
The book is billed "a course in discovering and recovering your creative self" and it is often taught in a group or workshop format. Navé, both with Cameron and solo, has facilitated events centered on the book (including a creativity camp in Taos) and continues to do so. In addition, he is the director of The Taos Storytelling Festival, The Taos Poetry Festival, The LEAF Poetry Slam, and an organizing member of TEDx New York Salons. He is also a co-founder of Twice 5 Miles, a content and creative collective based in Taos and Brooklyn.
Along the way Navé earned an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College and has memorized over 500 poems. Then, he says, prostate surgery and the vulnerability to cancer about five years ago was a “watershed moment.”
“It was a call to reconstruct myself after being knocked down,” he says. “Since then I’ve been re-evaluating my ambitions. I’ve smoothed out the urgency to push forward and make things happen.”
Things are more fluid now. All along he’s been learning what it’s like to have strangers become connections. Now there’s more of a trust component to all of it. He knows it’s about showing up and doing the work.
“I’m riveted to people, what they have to say, the stories they have to tell,” he says. “Now I say to people, how can I make your story visions be better?”
That’s where it all happens for Navé. Right there. It helps that he tells his own story so well.
by Nancy Colasurdo
