Twice a month, The Rumpus brings your favorite writers directly to your IRL mailbox via our Letters in the Mail program.
February 15 LITM: Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum
Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum is the author of the novel Elita (Northwestern University Press/TriQuarterly, January 2025) and three collections of short fiction. Her most recent collection, What We Do with the Wreckage, won the 2017 Flannery O’Connor Award. She is the recipient of a PEN/O. Henry Prize and fellowships from Sewanee, MacDowell, and the Jack Straw Writers Program. Her short stories have appeared in The Sun, Conjunctions, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, One Story, and other journals. She teaches seventh-grade English in Seattle, where she lives with her family.
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The Rumpus: What book(s) made you a reader? Do you have any recent favorites you’d like to share?
Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum: I was lucky to grow up with parents who are avid readers. In our household, books were at once prized and commonplace. My mom took my sister and me to the public library every week, and my dad read to us each night at bedtime. What that did was turn me into an early, voracious reader, and many of the books I read as a kid are still among the books I’d say have made the deepest impressions on me—books like C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, the Laura Ingalls Wilder Little House books, all of the original Nancy Drew titles, and everything by Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary. Later, as a young teenager, I remember sinking into A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, by Betty Smith, as well as Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Willa Cather’s My Antonia, and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. My favorites were books in which children had agency and independence, and in which their perspective on the world—which was inherently different and somehow more clear-eyed than that of the adults—was valuable to the story. These books helped me see reading as a way to understand myself, I think, though I couldn’t have articulated that at the time; and as well as solidifying my love of reading, they gave me a lasting respect for children that probably contributed to my decision to become a classroom teacher (I teach seventh grade) as well as a writer.
Rumpus: What’s a piece of good advice you received in a letter or a note?
Sundberg Lunstrum: I love this question because it implies the unique gift of written correspondence in an era when few of us are great at keeping up with each other in writing. Like most people, I often just call now (or, to be honest, text) rather than sitting down to pen a letter. That said, when I was younger, letter-writing was a significant part of many of my relationships. I have a couple of dear friends I’ve met face-to-face only a handful of times but with whom I’ve been in written correspondence for more than twenty-five years. I think these would have been much harder friendships to cultivate if we had not developed our knowledge of each other through letter-writing. Letters, of course, allow for quick depth and intimate honesty. Letter writing also gives the writer time to think about what to reveal and how to reveal it, and the recipient time to process those revelations and to cultivate empathy before responding. This mixture of time and care and vulnerability have made these friendships deep and lasting.
As I write this now, I think the other thing I love about letters is that they aren’t as ephemeral as other forms of communication, which lets the recipient hold onto and return again and again to any good advice received on the page. For me, such good advice was reliable in my husband’s grandmother’s letters to me. She was an excellent letter writer, and she wrote to me often in the first years I was dating and then married to her grandson. I looked forward to getting her envelopes in the mail because they were always handwritten and included things she’d clipped for me from magazines and newspapers too—comics and recipes and articles that had made her think of me. She was loving and kind, and we had many things in common to write to one another about, too. She encouraged me to apply to graduate school in creative writing, and later she was generous with her reminders to me to keep writing when rejections or harsh critiques were wearing me down. On the backs of her letters, she also always hand-wrote a poem she’d selected to share with me—Elizabeth Bishop or Robert Frost or Wallace Stevens. Their words were a kind of advice too. (Pay attention, they said. Keep writing, they told me. The world is still beautiful!) She died a few years ago, and I miss her, but I still have all the letters she sent me collected in binders to someday pass on to my daughter, who is named for her.
Rumpus: Tell us about your most recent book? How do you hope it resonates with readers?
Sundberg Lunstrum: My new (debut!) novel is titled Elita. It’s a literary mystery, focused on questions of female identity, agency, and belonging. In the autumn of 1951, a non-verbal girl (named Atalanta for the mythical girl-raised-by-a-bear) is discovered living and surviving on her own in the isolated and wild landscape of a prison island in south Puget Sound, Bernadette Baston is called in to consult on her case. Bernadette is an adjunct professor of child development and language acquisition, and as she works to understand her charge and to uncover the mystery of Atalanta’s identity, her own identity begins to unravel. This is a novel about the constraints of social acceptance for girls and women, about motherhood, about who gets a voice and whose voice is silenced by secrets or by force. As a mystery lover who had grown weary of plots hinged on violence that erases women, I began Elita with a question: What happens if the narrative instead hinges on a girl appearing? What story emerges from a woman’s refusal to be silenced?
I have to add that Elita was also born out of the landscape of Puget Sound, a landscape I believed I knew well until, in the summer of 2020, I began sailing its waterways with my family in a little twenty-four-foot sailboat. In the midst of the Covid lockdown, this boat was our way of getting out of the house. For much of that summer, we explored the channels and bays near our hometown on the northern coast of the Sound, camping out of the boat. It was then that I discovered McNeil Island, once the site of a federal penitentiary. At once isolated and within sight of the residential Anderson Island and the city of Tacoma, McNeil’s landscape, which is wild and beautiful, captivated me. Atalanta appeared in my imagination then, a girl emerging from that island, and her story—and that of her champion, Bernadette—began to unfurl. For years, my fiction has been rooted in questions about the human connection to landscape and about how place shapes who we are and how we see ourselves and others. This story, too, encompasses those questions.
I’m excited for readers to meet Atalanta and Bernadette, and—especially this winter, as our political reality again reinforces our culture’s deeply ingrained and long history of contempt for women—I hope that in these two strong characters readers find a story of resistance and individuation that is empowering and hopeful.
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Author photograph courtesy of Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum
