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.