Underjungle

Underjungle

A Conversation with Author JAMES STURZ

Underjungle is a tale of love, loss, family, and war—set entirely underwater. Sometimes I’ll joke it’s War and Peace, but 3,000 feet deeper. And shorter. And maybe a little funnier, too. But it’s also about our deep connection to the ocean. I wrote most of it in Hawaii during the pandemic, researching it off the coast. I knew that to write it I needed to say what it was like to be underwater. Not just to dive down, but to live there and be there, and for everything you know, whether it’s food, minerals, oxygen, ideas, or mates to come to you in the currents, through this thick and intensely rich medium that covers 70 percent of the planet. So I’d go to the coast to scuba dive or free dive. Not to chase after fish, but simply to sink and to take this different world in—one I was particularly happy to spend time in, not just because I love the water, but because so much of the rest of the world was closed off, and I feel free when I’m submerged it. And then I’d come home and try to figure out what everything I saw and felt meant, because I intended the book as a love song.

Poetry · Exile · Silence

Poetry · Exile · Silence

A Conversation with Poet MAJA LUKIC

I was born in Croatia, in the former Yugoslavia. We left that country when the civil war broke out, and I grew up in Canada, mostly, with a lot of subsequent moves from place to place. So very early in childhood, I was confronted with complex feelings I couldn’t describe yet, and I felt a deep inchoate sense of loss. I was coming from a country that no longer existed and speaking a language that, politically, no longer existed. It made me more solitary—I had a rich inner life and retreated to my imagination as a safe place, which is fantastic training ground for a writer’s life. At the same time, living in the immigrant community in Canada and meeting kids from other cultures and other languages, I understood something about the universality of human experience. Yes, it was painful to leave home because of a war, but others abandoned their homes, too.

On Identity · Disruption & Story

On Identity · Disruption & Story

A Conversation with Author JENNIFER SAVRAN KELLY

I was born and raised on Long Island in New York. My family moved around the island quite a bit, so I'm always interested in the idea of home. Is it a place or a feeling? Can it be lost or taken away? Undermined? Or is it something we make for ourselves? In my writing, I think this translates to the idea of foundational beliefs. I like to explore what happens when the foundational beliefs of my characters are shaken. Do they fold with the debris or rise from it changed, for better or worse?

Nightshining

Nightshining

A Conversation with Author JENNIFER KABAT

I grew up in a modernist subdivision of glass houses outside Washington, DC. And it was a bastion of left leaning values, where also nature --inside/outside--boundaries disappeared. It has a bylaw preventing fences, and its earliest residents created cooperatives for everything. That porousness and permeability, that sense of dissolving into the world around me, feels central to my writing and thinking, but so too politics. And then there is that wild Modernist dream (the one conveyed in, say, architecture and design, not so much the literature) that our stuff could change the world. It's radical and strange and a fairytale realm. Maybe not so surprisingly after my parents died, I wanted to rebuild their home in a field in upstate NY - which was the starting point in some ways for both The Eighth Moon and Nightshining.