James Sturz grew up in New York City, snorkeling in his bathtub and pretending the living room shag carpet was finger coral. Now based in Hawaii, he has covered the underwater world for The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The New York Times Magazine, Outside and Men’s Journal, among many publications. His fiction and journalism have been published in 18 countries and translated into nine languages. He graduated Magna Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Cornell University and is a PADI Divemaster. His first novel, Sasso, was set in the caves of Basilicata, Italy, very far from the water. @jamessturz
You born and raised in New York City. How did it shape your voice or perspective? I write frequently about the ocean now, both as the setting for fiction and essays, but my first fascination with the water occurred in an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. I’d snorkel in the bathtub and pretend the living room shag carpet was finger coral and that the view from our 12th-story windows was of a deep coral wall. My mother worried I’d knock over a lamp in my fins. Our cairn terrier was the size of a snapper.
The first concert I attended was John Denver at Madison Square Garden when I was in sixth grade. I was already watching Jacques Cousteau on the black-and-white TV in my room; when he sang “Calypso,” I was hooked. I got certified in scuba as soon as I could, in the vichyssoise waters of Skaneateles Lake in Upstate New York during college. We saw trout. Years later, I began covering the ocean as a journalist, and I became a rescue diver in North Carolina, an ice diver in New Hampshire, a divemaster in Florida, and a free diver in Hawaii. Yet after a while, I felt like I was telling the same stories over and over, and that none of them mattered, not in the face of all the changes and damage to our coasts, to the ocean, the climate, the coral, the ocean life. So I wanted to find a new way to write about the water—not just to say what it is, but what it’s like, the question that no one asks, which means then that it doesn’t have an answer—so that readers would love it and want to take care of it without having to be told what to do. That’s how I’ve gotten to where I am now, writing about the surge and saturation, the phosphorescent trickles and roiling sands and squeals and undulations, and what it’s like to embrace the ocean as your home. If you can move any direction in the water—not just up and down, but from side to side—then you can also move deeper into yourself and have the most meditative experience of your life in the water and reconnect where we all come from. And you know this not because you’ve gone scuba diving, but because you’ve taken a bath. Which brings me, full circle, to those first explorations in my tub.
What kind of reader were you as a child? What books made you fall in love with reading as a child? As a child, I was fascinated by stories of kids making sense of the world, since that’s what I was doing myself. The giants for me then were A Wrinkle in Time (I remember staying up while my parents slept, crying), the Encyclopedia Brown and Great Brain series, James and the Giant Peach, and The Chronicles of Narnia (more crying). But I was equally fond of books where the characters were only partially human—Dr. Seuss’s I Wish that I Had Duck Feet was my go-to story, along with my comics—or they weren’t human at all, especially E.B. White’s The Trumpet of the Swans, but all his other ones, too. I got to Animal Farm, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and Watership Down later, and it wasn’t until I was in my 50s that I started writing about non-human characters, myself.
When you're focused on writing a book, how does your day usually unfold? I live in Hawaii now, so my day starts with nature, looking out from my bed at the ocean from the midst of a pasture—in season, our view is whales and cows—and then it often includes a trail run, often past mongooses and wild pigs. All of this happens early, at an hour I once would have considered absurdly early, but in Hawaii you wake up with the sun, and once you see what’s out there you want to be part of it, too. Then once I’m back home from whatever activity I’ve been doing, and I’ve showered and eaten and there’s coffee inside me, I’ll mostly stay glued to my chair. Emails, bills, and the news come first, to get them out of the way (although I’m never completely done with the news anymore), and then comes the writing, which I hope will be writing I like and even that I’m proud of. One of the things that’s very different about my writing process in Hawaii, compared to how it used to be in New York, is I spend more time now just thinking, because I believe it’s important to find new connections and ideas and ways of conceiving the world, and perhaps there are also fewer distractions here. I keep drinking coffee until there’s none left in the carafe, and I try to keep going for as long as I can, until it’s time to consider dinner. Before stopping, I try to make sure I know where my story is going next, so I’ll take notes and write reminders so it’ll be easier for me once the sun’s up again. Structurally, I’ll often write a mini-version, or précis, of my story first, so that I can then follow the plotting and turn those few pages into a full manuscript. That doesn’t mean everything’s set, or that the story won’t change, but I know where I’m starting and where I’m ending, with a rough road map of how to travel between them. I guess that’s a little like trail running, too.
What creative challenges did you face in writing Underjungle, and how did you overcome them? My best-known project is probably my latest novel, Underjungle. It’s 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.
Do you keep a journal or notebook? If so, what’s in it? I have several notebooks. I suppose if I were more organized, I would just have one. Instead, I have a bouquet in different colors. They’re a mix of ideas and sentences or word combinations that occur to me, or connections between unlike things I think I can make. If I read or hear something that’s interesting or beautiful, I’ll put it in one of my notebooks, but always with quotation marks around it and the source, so I don’t ever make the mistake of thinking it was mine. At some point, I’ll input everything into my computer, so that I’ll have an expanding file of words, research, and ideas for any story. Because I often write about the water, I also have an underwater slate I take with me when I dive (actually, I have several, including one with multiple “pages” that wraps around my forearm, like Wonder Woman’s bracelets), because I know I can write more creatively and convincingly about the water when I’m deep inside it than I can at my desk. And, yes, I warn my dive buddies in advance that when I take it out it won’t mean I have an emergency too complicated for our shared vocabulary of hand signals. It’ll just mean I’m trying to say something new.
How do you research and what role does research play in your writing? Research is a crucial part of my writing. I’ve already written about researching Underjungle off Hawaii’s coast. But of course, there was plenty of the more-traditional research, the part that happens online, in academic journals, and with books. Frequently, I’ll do interviews, too. This is possibly also a good place for me to say that I don’t believe in writer’s block. Because if your story’s not coming together, you can always do more research, fine-tune your prose, or just sit back and think (which is the part that’s most often overlooked), and all of those are just as essential to the creative process. Every day needs to include some kind of progress.
Are there any authors you’d dream of having as a dinner guest?
My favorite writer is Leonard Michaels. I first read his stories in a creative writing seminar in college, at Cornell, and I’ve remained transfixed by his prose. I think I’ve read everything he wrote, and I’ll often flip through his books, most of which I brought with me to Hawaii. Even a few sentences will fill me with awe and with the desire to write better. He died in 2003, so that’s not going back very far. I probably should take advantage of going back a little further, so I’m going to add Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal aside.
Which creative disciplines outside of writing do you return to when seeking inspiration? I used to listen to music while I wrote, but I’ve stopped. I’m guarded about maintaining silence in my writing space, even if there never really is silence, because there are chirping birds and breezes, and also I have a dog, who sometimes has important things to say, including to the mongooses and pigs. But I’ve stopped listening to music because I try to find the musicality in the sentences I write and latch on to their beat. One of the things that fascinates me about Leonard Michaels is that he was tone deaf, so maybe his own sense of music and syncopation came from the sentences he wrote. When I was younger, I used to go to museums—I was in New York then, so there were lots—and I’d bring my notebook with me, and I’d see if there was something I could take from a painting and put into words, but I’m not sure how much success I ever had. As for seeing and hearing the places I write about, the best thing is simply to go there and pay attention. And it’s not just the seeing and hearing, but the smelling and tasting and feeling those places until they’re deep inside you. Then you can let them loose on the page.
AI and technology are changing the ways we write and receive stories. What are your reflections on AI, technology and the future of storytelling? And why is it important that humans remain at the center of the creative process? I don’t use AI in my writing, although I do search on Google, which now leads with an AI Overview, which I read, because it comes first. By now, we’ve all read how the different AI engines were fed a diet of novels, and the vast number of books, most of them pirated, that were used. So one problem with AI, at least right now, is that it’s limited to human experience and emotions as they’ve been written. I don’t know what AI will be capable of in the future. But it does mean that the pain and the misgivings and terrors and exhilaration and excitement, and all the wonderful greys in between, are limited to how others have expressed them already. What you can’t expect AI to do is to reach deep into its heart and pull out something glistening and new. That’s what human writers are for, if they are good.
Tell us about some books you've recently enjoyed and your favorite books and writers of all time. I’ve already talked about Leonard Michaels. My favorites are his novel Sylvia, and his second collection of stories, I Would Have Saved Them if I Could. I’m also going to suggest that the final sentence of Michaels’s short story “Jealousy,” from the collection To Feel These Things, is possibly the most beautiful one ever written in English: “Her question passed like the shadow of a bird through my heart.” Other writers who have mattered to me as I tried to understand what it meant to be a writer are James Joyce (the last sentence of Ulysses is also a doozy, possibly more beautiful, but very long), James Baldwin, J.M. Coetzee, Junot Díaz, William Faulkner, Jonathan Franzen, Ernest Hemingway, Judith Krantz, Vladmir Nabokov, Philip Roth, James Salter, Yehuda Amichai, and W.S. Merwin. The best book about loss I’ve ever read is The Disappearance by Geneviève Jurgensen. Since I write about the ocean, I’m also going to add three novels with sea creatures in them that I’ve read more recently (besides the obvious one by Shelby Van Pelt), which I haven’t stopped thinking about: The Pisces, by Melissa Broder; The Memory of Animals, by Claire Fuller; and Mrs. Caliban, by Rachel Ingalls.
Exploring literature, the arts, and the creative process connects me to… the world around me, but also to the one inside myself. The physical world is vast, contradictory, strange, beautiful, horrifying, and surprising. You need to walk out into it to see it—fall in love, shiver, break something, build something, heal. You need to run a marathon, whether it’s a real one or not. Literature and the other art forms won’t provide a road map for your journey, but they’ll help you make sense of what you discover once you are on it. The books that I read are my muscles, my training, my solace, and also my feasts. They are my protein. They’re preparation for when I sit down and create. We are capable of so many emotions, many of them overlapping and tangled together, and contradictory too. Making sense of them and refining them is the art, the part of the writing that will always be more important than the pretty sentences and plot, at least to me. So the creative process is how I take everything I can read, hear, touch, smell and taste, and use it to access the fire inside me so that I can let out into the rest of the world, as something burning and insistent.
