Profile: Kirsten Lunstrum

Kirsten’s collection of stories, What We Do With the Wreckage, won the 2017 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. She graduated from the UC Davis Creative Writing Master’s program in 2003.

Are there one or two books that were pivotal to you becoming an author? Do you remember your first encounter with them? What did they mean to you?

I could go on and on listing books and authors whose work has been influential to me, but if I think about the books that were most central in shaping my own drive to write, I have to go back to the books I read as an adolescent. Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and Willa Cather's My Antonia were both books I first read during middle school (hiding in the back of the school library on lunch breaks, actually), and they still feel foundational to me. They were books about young women with the kind of strength and courage I so wanted to believe I also had, and their stories engrossed me. I've gone back to both books many times over the years (in fact, I read My Antonia almost yearly, and last summer I took my family on a little pilgrimage to the Willa Cather homestead in Red Cloud, Nebraska), and I always feel that I learn more about narrative and prose style and character development when I re-read them.

The other writer whose work I have to mention in talking about influence is Alice Munro. I can't pin down just one of her books as essential to me because they've all been essential in my life as a reader and writer. Munro writes stories that pull me under and hold me. She is my model of short story mastery and of writing about women's lives (in particular) with honesty and beauty and insight. ... Maybe this sounds silly, but for years I've been meaning to write her a fan letter of thanks, but I haven't done it yet--mostly because I'm so incredibly in awe of her work that I stumble each time I start. She's the best of the best, however, and I think every reader should know her stories.

What inspires you now? What keeps you writing?

My stories almost all begin in setting, so it's place that most inspires me. I feel like I spend a lot of the time that I'm not writing paying attention and cataloging what I've seen to be used later in a story, and most of what I'm paying attention to is the detail of place. I have notebooks full of scribbled observations of places I've visited (most recently the Ballard Locks in Seattle, the walk-in clinic waiting room where I spent a Saturday with an ailing family member, a spot outside the Montlake Cut where I kayaked one early morning last spring). These notes are the starts of stories--and they exist because something in each place struck me as being full of narrative potential. I keep writing, I guess, because that potential is like a voice calling for attention, and I want to follow it and see where it leads.

If you could choose one book for the present moment, what would you choose and why?

I teach high school, and the literature classes I'm assigned to lead run on an every-other-year schedule. Last year I was slated to teach "Dystopian Literature." I've taught the class before, but teaching it in the midst of the 2016 election and the first months of the new presidency was unlike teaching that class at any point in the past. Although I initially felt reluctant to dive into politically dark literature during what I was experiencing as a politically dark time, what I found was that in reading and discussing books like Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Orwell's 1984 and J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, my students and I were able to process our fears about and reactions to what was happening in our own world through examining the worlds of these novels. It was a reminder that literature (and all art)--at its best--offers us context and a way to untangle the complexities of our own experiences, as well as a sense of fellowship with other people. This is why literature remains essential, no matter how the world changes.

You can find out more about Kirsten and her work here.