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

Today’s conversation unfolds in a sunlit adobe room in Taos, New Mexico, where writer Rebecca Jarmas, also known by her pen name Alice W Meadows, joins me to explore the deep intersection of creativity, community, and resilience.

Rebecca shares her journey from a successful career in finance into the uncertain, demanding, and ultimately liberating world of writing. At the heart of our conversation is her lifelong experience with migraine disease—an often invisible, debilitating condition that has shaped both her life and her work. Out of that challenge, she’s created a children’s book designed to help young readers understand and communicate what they’re going through—something she never had as a child.

We talk about the power of writing as medicine, the role of community in overcoming creative paralysis, and how vulnerability becomes a gateway to authentic expression. Rebecca also opens up about starting a Substack, finding her voice later in life, and learning how to quiet the inner critic long enough to let the imagination speak.

This is a conversation about honoring the dreams we made as children, finding courage in the face of chronic struggle, and discovering that sometimes the very thing that holds us back becomes the source of our greatest creative offering.

Narrative. Authority. Voice. Ease. Four elements shape everything you do.

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

In this solo episode, I explore the living framework of narrative, authority, voice, and ease—not as abstract ideas, but as practical forces shaping how we move through the world. From a two-day drive out of Asheville to a quiet morning on a sun porch in Saint Louis, I track how small strategic choices create either stress or ease in real time.

Along the way, I reflect on storytelling as a lived experience, not just something performed on stage. I look at writing through dictation, the publishing world through Planet Money, and the reality of building creative work without chasing scale or spectacle.

This episode moves through travel, intuition, community radio, and the deeper question: why do we tell stories at all?

At its core, this is about learning to trust your own narrative, stand in your authority, recognize your voice, and allow ease to emerge—even in uncertain conditions.

Run of Show — Your Life Is the Narrative—Now What Do You Do With It?

00:00 — Opening: Storytelling vs Living Your Story
Moving from stage storytelling to life as narrative

03:00 — The Framework
Narrative, Authority, Voice, Ease explained

07:00 — Voice and Ease
Voice as identity
Ease as the result of alignment

11:00 — Life as Narrative
Every choice shapes the story
Control vs improvisation

15:00 — When Life Gets Hard
Illness, struggle, and delayed ease

19:00 — Strategy and Ego
Blind spots
Choosing better options

23:00 — The Drive Example
Asheville to Saint Louis
Two narratives: stress vs ease

27:00 — Choosing Ease
Route decision
Slowing down vs rushing

31:00 — Ease in Action
Avoiding stress and speeding
Presence and environment

34:00 — Rest and Rhythm
Sleeping in the car
Repeating successful patterns

37:00 — Intuition
Truck stop decision
Listening to internal signals

40:00 — Turning Story into Writing
Dictation vs writing
Speaking to create text

43:00 — Planet Money and Publishing
How books get made
Audience, scale, and authority

47:00 — Scale and Reality
Numbers matter
Knowing your range

50:00 — Why I Do This Work
Imaginative Storm
Helping people express their voice

53:00 — Living Your Narrative
Identity, daily life, poetic awareness

55:00 — Closing + Poems
Final reflections
Ogden Nash

Welcome to Twice 5 Miles Radio. I’m your host, James Navé. Today I’m going solo—reflecting on time, memory, and the places that shape us. From spring mornings in western North Carolina to long walks in the south of France, this episode moves through poetry, travel, and friendships that hold across decades.

At the center is Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas—a poem I memorized years ago that continues to echo through my life. Along the way, I reconnect with an old friend in Paris and reflect on the song Those Were the Days.

This is a meditation on aging, creativity, and what remains—ending with an original poem and an invitation to consider your own creative life.

Math, Poetry, and the Calculations of Everyday Life

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

This week I’m going solo from Lake Eden, looking out at early spring and thinking about something I once believed I couldn’t do—math.

For most of my life, I thought I was “bad at math.” What I didn’t understand is that I’ve been doing math all along—estimating distance, time, sound, movement, decisions—every single day.

In this episode, I follow a shift in perspective sparked by a simple conversation: there’s math in school, and there’s math in life. And the math of life is something we all practice intuitively.

From the rhythm of airplanes overhead to the unfolding of spring in the mountains, from Fibonacci patterns in wildflowers to the structure of poetry, I explore how calculation and imagination are not separate—they’re deeply connected.

Along the way, I move through Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock, and into improvisation—where language, instinct, and form begin to emerge in real time.

This is an episode about perception, belief, and learning to trust the intelligence you already have.

Topics include:

Everyday “life math” vs academic math
Intuition as a form of calculation
Fibonacci patterns and natural design
Poetry as structured mathematics
Belief vs proof — where math ends and imagination begins
T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock and the idea of “spareness”
Imaginative improvisation as a creative practice

TIMESTAMPS

00:00 Introduction — Going solo from Lake Eden
02:00 Everyday calculations (coffee, planes, seasons)
06:30 “I’m bad at math” — a false story
10:00 Normandy conversation — math in life vs school
15:30 Intuition and subconscious calculation
20:00 Nature, patterns, and Fibonacci sequence
26:30 Poetry, belief, and what can’t be proven
34:00 Wallace Stevens — sensing beyond logic
40:00 Politics, perception, and miscalculation
46:00 T.S. Eliot — Prufrock and identity
01:05:00 Imagination and improvisation exercise
01:15:00 Closing reflections — trusting your own intelligence

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

This episode traces a prostate cancer diagnosis, surgery, and 100 days of writing through recovery.

Fifteen years ago, I had surgery for prostate cancer. The next morning, I started writing—one piece a day for 100 days.

I’m recording this at Lake Eden in Western North Carolina, and today I’m going solo.

The first piece was just a report from the day. I didn’t call it a poem. I just needed something to do while I recovered. So I did it again the next day. And the next.

It turned into 100 days of writing—one piece a day while I was healing.

In this episode, I walk back through that time—the diagnosis, the surgery, the fear, the help I received, and the daily practice that kept me connected to my life while everything slowed down.

I wasn’t writing about cancer every day. I was writing about whatever showed up—friends, places, memories, small details. But underneath it all, the experience was shaping the work.

If you’ve ever been through something that stopped you in your tracks, this is simple: pay attention, keep going, and make something from where you are.

Topics include:

• Prostate cancer diagnosis and surgical decision-making
• Writing as a daily recovery practice
• 100 poems in 100 days (process over perfection)
• Creativity as a stabilizing force during trauma
• Friendship, community, and asking for help
• Life after surgery—physically and artistically

A hospital bed. A recorder. One small goal.
That’s how 100 days of writing began.

00:00 Introduction — Going solo

01:10 Cancer diagnosis (2011)

04:30 Fear, secrecy, and first steps

08:45 Meeting the urologist / treatment options

13:20 Decision to have surgery

18:10 Surgery day — March 31

21:00 First poem after surgery

24:30 Writing as recovery practice

30:00 Help from friends / community

36:40 Day 7 — cancer clear

42:00 Expanding to 100 poems

48:30 Taos, travel, and returning to life

55:00 New York — nearing 100 days

01:02:00 Finishing the 100 poems

01:06:00 What the experience taught me

01:10:00 Closing reflections

Welcome to Twice 5 Miles—fertile ground for conversations worth listening to and remembering. I’m your host, James Navé, going solo today.

This episode is an improvisational field recording of a question I’ve been invited to answer onstage in six minutes: how do we unlabel words like death? A friend, Dr. Aditi Sethi, nudged me toward the idea that many of us carry rigid definitions of death—definitions shaped by fear, habit, and inherited language.

So I start by listening to the way we casually toss death around in everyday speech, then follow the thread into story and poetry: E. E. Cummings’ “Mister Death,” Langston Hughes’ quiet disappearance, Sara Teasdale’s wartime spring, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s love after death, and Tennyson’s Ulysses sailing “beyond the sunset.”

Along the way, I tell a few dog stories—classroom dogs, my own dog Traveler—and I look at the “little deaths” we live through all the time. This is a meditation on death, yes, but also on love, attention, and the language that shapes what we can bear.

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

Today, my guest is Megan O’Malley—coach, speaker, and soon-to-be TEDx Asheville presenter—whose work explores our cultural addiction to certainty, control, and the subtle ways “should” shapes our lives

In this wide-ranging conversation, Megan reflects on what it means to surrender without collapsing, to choose agency over fear, and to cultivate wisdom in an age of information overload. We talk about verification, intuition, and the messy middle of creativity—where innovation actually begins.

Megan candidly shares her own journey through divorce, career shifts, and personal loss, and how those experiences are shaping her upcoming TED Talk on unhooking from certainty so we can access deeper creativity and connection.

Along the way, we wrestle with big questions: How do we know what to believe? What’s the difference between control and agency? Is “should” a tyrant—or a tool? And what does it really mean to embrace the mess?

This is a thoughtful, soulful conversation about creative evolution, spiritual intelligence, and the courage to stand in not-knowing long enough for something new to emerge.

To Tell or Not to Tell with James Navé

Telling a poem is different than performing it.
It’s closer to telling a story than delivering a text.

Welcome to Twice 5 Miles Radio. I’m your host, James Navé. Today I’m going solo once again, spending time with a subject that’s been close to me for many years: how we read, perform, recite—or, as I prefer to say, tell—a piece of literature.

I’ve earned my living doing this work. I’ve stood on stages, read into microphones, memorized poems, improvised, stumbled, and kept going. And even now, after all these years, I’m still not completely satisfied. I say that with a bit of tongue-in-cheek—I'm fairly happy—but I’m always curious about how to go deeper and stay honest.

In this episode, I explore what happens when reading aloud becomes a way of editing, listening, and emotional connection. I talk about voice, mess, and presence; about community radio as a place to experiment; and about telling a poem the way you’d tell a story. This isn’t about getting it right. It’s about letting the words live in the room.