Stay after the show for the IMAGINATIVE STORM experience with James Nave & Allegra Huston!
Available to our in-person audiences and over livestream worldwide! Get Tickets.
Sugar & S**t was incubated in the IMAGINATIVE STORM training.
What is it inside your imagination that keeps surprising you?
Find joy & discovery in your writing, beyond the rational mind. We hope that the audience leaves inspired to unleash their stories, just like we did!
Allegra Huston
Allegra Huston is the author of Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found (2009) and a novel, A Stolen Summer (2018, published in hardback in 2017 as Say My Name). She has also written for newspapers and magazines including Newsweek, Vogue, People, the Santa Fean, and Condé Nast Traveler in the US; the Independent on Sunday (as part of the series “Lives of the Great Songs”), Harper’s Bazaar, Mail on Sunday YOU magazine, the Tatler, and The Times in the UK; as well as French Vogue and the international art and culture magazine Garage, where for five years she was on the editorial team. Her article on midwifery, “Catching Babies in New Mexico,” written for Mothering magazine, is on the website of the New Mexico State Historian.
She is a co-founder of the publishing company Twice 5 Miles Guides: The Stuff Nobody Teaches You. She is the author of How to Edit and Be Edited: and polish your writing to a professional shine, and the co-author, with James Navé, of How to Read for an Audience: and touch people’s hearts.
Allegra wrote and produced the cult short film Good Luck, Mr. Gorski (2011), which won the Grand Remi at the Houston Worldfest and was shown in many prestigious festivals including Mill Valley, the Hamptons, Torino, Cartagena, Rhode Island, and L.A. Shorts. You can watch it at vimeo.com/allegrahuston/goodluckmrgorski. Projects in development include four features and three TV series.
Allegra grew up in London, Ireland, Long Island, Los Angeles, and Mexico, where her dad, John Huston, lived for the last decades of his life. (She is lucky to have had two wonderful fathers: the film director John Huston and the historian John Julius Norwich.) She read English at Hertford College, Oxford, then spent nine years in publishing in London, first at Chatto & Windus and then as Editorial Director of Weidenfeld & Nicolson. In her thirty years as an editor, Allegra has worked with three Booker Prize winners and two Nobel Prize winners, as well as Sir James Goldsmith and Jane Goodall.
Allegra has taught writing workshops at the National University of Ireland, Galway, the University of Oklahoma, and the UK’s prestigious Arvon Foundation, and teaches an annual five-day memoir writing course. She is the co-founder, with James Navé, of Imaginative Storm Writing Workshops; you will find a community devoted to supporting those who are exploring writing as a creative pursuit at imaginativestorm.circle.so. We are currently developing an online 10-week course to be called Imaginative Storm Writer Training.
I currently live in Taos, New Mexico, in a traditional adobe house which I designed and built with my son’s father. Looking out the window from the table where I work, I see nearly 100 miles: horizon after horizon of extinct volcanoes that undulate like an ocean. A few years ago I started taking piano lessons, and my proudest accomplishment is being able to play Chopin’s Nocturne #1–not very well, but well enough for me.
James Nave
James Navé has made over 10,000 public appearances during his career as a poet, teacher, and storyteller. He has taught writing, creativity, performance poetry, and public speaking worldwide, from Nouakchott, Mauritania, to Galway, Ireland, to Bangkok, Thailand, Lima, Peru, and all across the US. In addition, he has memorized over 600 poems.
He holds an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a BA in International Relations from UNCA. His latest book of poems, The 100 Days, will be published by 3: A Taos Press in late 2021.
His poetry has appeared in various publications, including the North Carolina Literary Review, Asheville Review, Summit, Chokecherries, Jagged Edge Mountain Gear Catalogue, River Oak Review, Red Wheelbarrow, Dirty Goat, Phoebe Journal, Schuylkill Valley Journal of the Arts, Dislocate, Tightrope Journal, Griffin: Gwynedd-Mercy College, SC Review, Willard and Maple, and Paris Lit Up.
He co-founded and directed The Artist's Way Creativity Camp in partnership with Julia Cameron, author of The Artist's Way. In addition, he has been the Poetry Slam emcee for The LEAF Festival and on the LEAF Global Arts advisory team since 1995. He hosts a weekly long-form interview podcast called Twice 5 Miles Radio: on WPVM-FM, 103.7, Asheville. He is co-founder of The Imaginative Storm Writing Project, an educational company for creatives who want to get their work over the finish line.
Finally, he once owned a pizza restaurant on the coast of Carolina, won a poetry slam at Chicago's Green Mill with a perfect 30 score.
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