UNDERCURRENTS is an exploration of shame and its darkly nuanced behaviors – guilt, deception, obsession and compulsion – that lead to dysfunctional relationships and self-destructive masking. The novel is set in the Cahaba coal region of Alabama in1979.
The story is told in the tradition of Flannery O’Connor – decayed physical and emotional landscapes, sweet snipes and snarky speech that never means what it says, death as a matter of fact event, psychological terrors, warnings and other potentially supernatural occurrences, and irreverence and the grotesque, creating scenes that buzz with panic and desire. Sara St. James, daughter of Soren St. James and granddaughter of Henry St. James, has commitment issues, her worst imp of the perverse being personal relationships. After Soren’s fatal accident, Sara finds her grandfather’s mysterious tin box of relic-like mementos and enthusiastically opens the box only to find it filled with secrets and lies. Among her grandfather’s sentimental and found artifacts are letters and photographs that imply Sara did not know her mother well if at all and the man she thought was her father may not have been, even her date of birth may have been invented. As Sara navigates the murky waters of human relationships, shining a light into unlit corners and questioning what she has taken for granted, she finds common ground with her mother and grandfather in their capacity to persevere and remake identities that have been shaped by tragedy.
Relevant publications:
I am author of two books and a number of essays on identity and narrative (see Diane DuBose Brunner). My work has been published at SUNY Press, Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, U of California Press Berkeley, Columbia U Press, and in Discourse, The Feminist Teacher, Pedagogy, Concerns, Review of Education/Pedagogy/Cultural Studies, and in Journal of Curriculum Theorizing.
New projects:
When sound travels through the body, it produces a kind of reverb or echo, fleeting as a dream but filled with life – blood, sweat, tears – a salt dream. SALT DREAM – work in process – asks the question: What if you woke up and discovered that your life had been a dream? The novel remembers Pedro Calderón de la Bark’s play, Life is a Dream.
SOME REMEMBERED RADIANCE: REFLECTIONS ON FRIENDSHIP is a small collection of personal narratives beginning with Eulogy for Magda followed by Climbing Stories and Why is Still My Favorite Word.
Undercurrents 
This looks terrific, Diane! Hope it brings you and Sara lots of new “friends.”
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Throughout my reading of Diane Brunner’s draft manuscript of “Undercurrents” I found myself alternately laughing out loud at scenes of absurd comedy and hilariously tetchy dialogue, then sharing in the characters’ heart-rending experiences of trauma and loss, traveling from one generation to the next.
In particular, I felt an immediate intimacy with Sara St. James. Her thorny relationship with her mother, along with her wildness and recklessness in the face of unsuspected truths she’d rather not confront, were expressed with brutal honesty. At times I felt I was sitting at the kitchen table with Sara, Scotch and cigarette in hand, ruminating on the weight of the past and the still weightier fear of what’s coming next.
Brunner sympathetically tells the story of family tragedy, its symptomatic shame, how we use obsessiveness to numb and avoid hard truths, and how we persist.
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