How to Read for an Audience: A Writer's Guide (Twice 5 Miles Guides: The Stuff Nobody Teaches You)

Public readings are a vital part of promoting your writing – but most writers don’t know how do them well. This lively step-by-step guide will teach you how to connect with an audience and convert listeners into fans. [180]HOW TO READ FOR AN AUDIENCE is the first book designed to teach writers how to present their work in public. Short yet packed with information, this indispensable guide advises you how to choose your material, how to prepare, and how to make your bookstore reading or open mic a powerful promotion of your work. Nervous? Feeling unprepared or overwhelmed? Worry no more! James Navé and Allegra Huston, a performance poet/creativity coach and a novelist/editor, share their decades of combined experience in an easy-to-read guide that will increase both your comfort level and your skill in reading for an audience. You might even come to enjoy it!“Bursting with outstanding insights and fresh ideas . . . should be required reading for all writers, as well as all creative writing teachers and students. Whether you’re a newbie beginner or a well-seasoned pro, this book will make you a better reader and writer.”—Kate Christensen, PEN/Faulkner Award-winning author and former teacher at Iowa Writers Workshop“Deft, clear and charming . . . This series promises to immediately fill a tremendous need in the lives of those of who still live and die by the book.” —Jonathan Lethem, NYT bestselling author and Chair in Creative Writing, Pomona College “James Navé’s help is practical, unique and gets to the psychological core. He is encouraging in that most helpful sense: he shows you how to find your courage. Before I could become a bestselling author, I had to become an author, and there is no better coach/advisor/shaman for ‘becoming’ than Navé. I grew with his encouragement, guidance and funneling my fog into focus. He has guided me on how to present myself both on the page and on the stage.”— Greg Palast, investigative journalist and NYT bestselling author“HOW TO READ FOR AN AUDIENCE is a book I would recommend to every author. It’s a skill that all writers need help with, particularly as they begin their careers. Performing in public rarely comes naturally and this clear and sympathetic guide will swiftly become an indispensable tool for anyone faced with the challenge of standing in front of an audience.”— Alexandra Pringle, Editor-in-Chief, Bloomsbury Publishing

James Navé has taught creative writing for institutions including the University of Oklahoma, the University of Alabama, Duke University, the National University of Ireland, Galway, and International Schools on five continents. He co-founded the theater company Poetry Alive!, which for over three decades has sent teams of performance readers into schools and colleges to present classic poems, reaching over six million students to date. For eight years he produced Artist's Way Creativity Workshops with Julia Cameron, bestselling author of The Artist's Way. He is currently director of the Taos Storytelling Festival and is a founding member of LEAF Community Arts, which hosts the biannual LEAF Festival near Asheville, North Carolina. He is the author of two books, The Road (1998) and Looking at Light (2012), and holds an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Please visit jamesnave.com.

Allegra Huston is the author of Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found, the novel Say My Name, and "Forgiveness Through Writing," a course available at DailyOm, as well as the companion to this volume, How to Work with a Writer. After nine years as a publisher in London, she is now a freelance writer, editor, and teacher. Authors she has worked with include two Nobel Prize winners, three Booker Prize winners, Sir James Goldsmith, and Jane Goodall. She holds a First Class Honours degree in English Language and Literature from Hertford College, Oxford. Please visit allegrahuston.com.