I just read a beautiful and touching short story called “Clean Breaks” in The Sun. It’s by a very talented Northwest writer named Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum. The piece focuses on a woman solo-sailing in Northwest waters who comes across a stranded man and his sick daughter, which brings out her own painful past.
You can read the story for free at https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/584-clean-breaks.
Sundberg-Lunstrum, who lives near Seattle, also has a Northwest-based novel coming out in January called Elita (TriQuarterly/Northwestern University Press). Here’s a description of it from the press’s website:
An American literary take on the Nordic noir genre
Unfolding during the moody Pacific Northwest winter of 1951, we follow Bernadette Baston, scholar of child development and language acquisition, as she travels to a penitentiary on the remote island Elita in the Puget Sound to consult on a curious case: two guards have discovered an animal-like adolescent girl living alone in the cold woods beyond the prison’s walls. There are few answers, but many people who know more than they are saying. According to official reports, the girl, dubbed Atalanta, does not speak. Is her silence protecting someone? The prison warden, court-appointed guardian, and police detective embroil Bernadette in resolving a secret that the tight-knit island community has long held, and her investment in the girl’s case soon becomes more personal than professional. As a mother, wife, and woman bound by mid-twentieth-century expectations, Bernadette strategizes to retain the fragile control she has over her own freedom, identity, and future, which becomes inextricably tied to solving Atalanta’s case.
Elita is available for pre-ordering now:
Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum is the author of three collections of short fiction, What We Do With the Wreckage (2017 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction winner, University of Georgia Press in October, 2018), This Life She’s Chosen (2005, Chronicle Books) and Swimming With Strangers (2008, Chronicle Books). Her short fiction and essays have appeared widely in journals, including The Sun, Prairie Schooner, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, North American Review, One Story, The American Scholar, Michigan Quarterly Review, Willow Springs, and Southern Humanities Review. Kirsten has been the recipient of a PEN/O. Henry Prize and fellowships from MacDowell, the Sewanee Writers Conference, and the 2016 Jack Straw Writers Program. She teaches creative writing and literature and lives with her family near Seattle, Washington.
The photo of the silhouetted sailboat above, which illustrates Sundberg Lunstrum’s story in The Sun was taken by Northwest photographer George Meier, who holds the copyright to it. Meier lives in New Denver, British Columbia, Canada. He picked up photography after working for social change as a lawyer and then as a minister.
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