Loosening the Strings

Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum’s story “Clean Breaks,” which appears in our August issue, is her first publication in The Sun, but she is a veteran fiction writer: she’s the author of three collections of stories, most recently What We Do with the Wreckage, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction.

When Kirsten and I spoke by video call, she was in an eight-by-eight-foot room in her yard that her husband built for her when he was furloughed during the COVID-19 lockdown. She referred to the space as a sanctuary, a place where she can teach and write without interruption. The idea of closeting oneself away for solitude reminded me of Sonja, the main character in “Clean Breaks,” who, after experiencing a traumatic event, leaves her home and nursing career behind to live alone on a sailboat. Kirsten and I discussed the inspiration for this story as well as her writing process for her forthcoming novel, Elita, which will be released by TriQuarterly Books in January 2025.

During our conversation we kept stumbling onto things we have in common: we’re both fans of mystery novels; her husband, like mine, is a sailing enthusiast who has built a wooden boat; and Kirsten’s favorite part of teaching seventh graders is exactly what my mom, a retired middle-school teacher, liked most about working with kids that age. It’s always a pleasure to meet (albeit virtually) the authors whose work fills The Sun’s pages, especially when it feels like we already know each other.

 

Nancy Holochwost: One of the first things I noticed about “Clean Breaks” is its detailed, technical descriptions of boats. Can you tell me about your sailing experience?

Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum: I feel like real sailors would immediately laugh at my being called a sailor. I am affiliated with someone who knows how to sail. [Laughs.] My husband has always loved boats. We live on Puget Sound in Washington State, and several years ago he built a wooden dinghy from a kit and learned to sail it. In 2020, when our family couldn’t safely vacation during the pandemic, we bought a twenty-four-foot sailboat built in the 1980s and took it around the sound. I acted as deckhand and learned the terminology. Writers always like language, and the jargon of niche professions like sailing is fascinating to me. I also liked the way being on the water put me in touch with parts of the landscape I wouldn’t otherwise get to see. My home, which I deeply love and thought I knew very well, suddenly felt totally new because I hadn’t seen the places you can only get to by boat.

Nancy: “Clean Breaks” is set in the bays and harbors of the Pacific Northwest. Did having fresh eyes on this area make you want to use it as the story’s setting?

Kirsten: For me story always starts in place: I never know what the plot will be or who the characters are until I have a setting in mind. I chose the Pacific Northwest in part because it’s so gorgeous. Living here never, never gets old. Also the landscape is changeable in a way I think is fascinating. I’ve spent a lot of time during the autumn and winter months out on our boat, and it is foggy and atmospheric—totally different than it is in the summertime. I wanted to write that moody setting, and out of that desire came the story. But I haven’t actually been to many of the places the main character visits. I’ve seen British Columbia from land, for instance, but not from the water. I ended up doing a lot of research to make the story feel real.

Nancy: Sonja, the main character, has chosen to live alone on a boat, but throughout the story she forms connections with people she happens to meet. What interests you about that push-and-pull between solitude and companionship?

Kirsten: I’ve seen a lot of recent writing about the tension between wanting to be in a social group and wanting to be alone, or about people feeling isolated whether or not they want to be. There’s talk about how that tension is coming out of what we lived through over the last four years, during and after the pandemic shutdowns. But the truth is, that tension has always existed for me. I’m an anxious person by nature, and a lot of my anxieties are about other people. But I also love people, and I’m totally fascinated by them; that’s part of why I’m drawn to write stories. It’s interesting and necessary for me to be around other humans, yet at the same time, there’s always a spinning out after I part ways with them: What did I say? How did I misstep? Did I connect? Did I not connect? I overthink all of those interactions. And Sonja does that too.

Nancy: You teach seventh grade. Does anything from the classroom ever find its way into your writing?

Kirsten: I’ve been a teacher for twenty-four years, but I’m new to seventh grade, and I love it. I think what’s found its way into my fiction so far is curiosity. What I really like about young teenagers is that they’re still close enough to childhood that no question is off the table. I used to teach high school and higher ed, and my students were careful about being seen as intellectuals or being taken seriously. Seventh graders are still at the cusp of becoming guarded. It’s been such a good reminder to me to just ask all the questions. I’m embracing—or trying to embrace—the freedom of that attitude that says it’s OK to play and experiment. Instead of writing stories I’m pretty certain I can manage, I’m more apt to wonder, what would happen if I tried to write something that steps into the uncanny? What if I dip my toes into speculative fiction?

Nancy: Your first novel, Elita, will be published in January. Was writing a novel a different experience for you than writing short fiction?

Kirsten: It was totally different. Stories are my natural landing place: the shape of a story makes sense to me, probably because I’m a compulsive thinker and a perfectionist. In a story you can be fastidious and obsessive about the detail of the sentences in a way I think a novel is just too big to hold.

Elita is the fourth novel I’ve written, but the first one that’s become a completely realized narrative that has found a publishing home. I see now that the three novels I wrote before it were exercises in learning how to let go. The third one was actually a novel in stories, and when it didn’t sell, I broke it up and made some revisions, and many of those stories ended up in my third collection of short fiction, What We Do with the Wreckage. That experience helped me realize I needed to figure out how to loosen the strings a little bit to make a novel work as a whole.

During the pandemic lockdown, I sent the two women in my writing group what I thought was the beginning of a story, and they said, “No, this is a novel.” That prospect was terrifying. But I had time to really think during those months when we couldn’t do anything but be in our homes, and I was able to chip away at the book every day in a way I hadn’t often been able to do in the past. And I had my two amazing writing-group partners by my side. I’ve been calling them the midwives of the novel because it wouldn’t have happened without them.

Nancy: What is Elita about?

Kirsten: It begins when a nonverbal child is discovered living in the woods on a remote prison island in south Puget Sound in the 1950s. It’s a real island, and when I discovered it—while sailing!—I was fascinated by it. The main character, Bernadette, is a professor of education with a focus on language acquisition and child development, and she’s asked to help officials understand this girl who cannot tell her own story. From there, the novel becomes much more complicated, and Bernadette has to figure out the central question: How much autonomy do you have to give up to be accepted in society? It’s a question both for the girl and for Bernadette, who’s trying to make her way within the gender norms of her time.

I would call the book a feminist mystery. I love mysteries, but so often they begin with violence to a girl or a woman. I wanted to write a mystery in which no girl dies, so I needed the center of the story to be not the vanishing of a girl, but the emerging presence of a girl. How does she not become erased by the systems that control women?

Elita isn’t out in the world yet—it will be published in January—but it’s been an absolute dream to have people begin to see what my intentions were as they read the manuscript. I feel a strangely deep affection for these characters, as if they are people I love. It’s wonderful to watch others start to see them too.

Nancy: Maybe it’s too soon to ask you this question, but do you want to write another novel?

Kirsten: I do, now that I’ve lived in that space of immersion. I had to be patient; I couldn’t compress my time or my ideas in the way I was used to doing with stories. I had to allow myself to sink and let go of a sense of control. Now that I’ve done it once, it seems more possible to do it again. And I miss the sense of stepping from my life into an imagined space, which I don’t experience as fully when I’m writing a short story. When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time in my imagined worlds, which were very real to me because I returned to them again and again. There’s an element of novel writing that’s similar, and I loved it. I hadn’t experienced that full absorption in my imagination since childhood.