Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum was recently in Davis for a reading with fellow author and M.A. graduate Jodi Angel. The Greenbelt Review staff was able to catch up with her at Delta of Venus. Kirsten's first book, This Life She's Chosen , came out in February 2005 and was chosen by Barnes & Noble as a “Discover Great New Writers” selection. Her short fiction has appeared in Willow Springs and Calyx Journal , and has been nominated for a pushcart.
GR: I was hoping you could talk a little bit about what the process of getting a book deal was like for you and how you feel about having the work published.
KSL: This Life She's Chosen came entirely out of my master's thesis. Nothing was cut; when Chronicle accepted it they rearranged the stories and re-titled them, but other than that I really didn't have to do much editing. It all happened pretty quickly. Pam Houston suggested that I send my thesis out, and everything kind of fell into place after that. After the book came out I couldn't write for a couple of years. It seemed like there was this pressure to write something better, something that wasn't the same as what I'd been writing, but that lived up to and exceeded that. I had some trouble figuring out what the next project should be. Because the book was selected by Barnes & Noble as a “Discover Great New Writers” title, I was fortunate in that I was scheduled to promote the book at bookstore readings. You have to become kind of a personality to do readings like that, and because so much of what I was doing was marketing my work, I felt really detached from things. It all felt fake to me and I kept asking myself questions. Is this really what I want? Is there something more useful I could be doing? Is this why I started writing in the first place? I wasn't sure that I wanted to write again, but I wasn't sure what I would do or who I would be otherwise. I had to kind of come back to it, and I think that sort of experience is common. It's difficult to go from the first thing to the next thing.
GR: You said that you're working on a second collection of short stories now, and it seems like there's a lot of pressure from publishers who want writers to produce novels. How did you decide to work on another collection of stories instead of a novel?
KSL: You can only really write what you're writing. I think the short story allows for a kind of perfection that I don't see in novels very much. I'm not saying that I ever attain that perfection in my own stories, but I love when I read someone's story and it almost gets there. I don't think that's quite possible in a novel. I like that the story works in a different way formally, too. I think that in a novel, because you have such a large span, there's more of a need for a certain kind of ending. Though there are many novels that break this mold, in general, I think the form has to be more structured. It has to have more of an emphasis on plot, I guess, and I'm not as interested in that as a writer. In a story I like the kind of puzzle that you get to work with. I think my favorite part of writing is trying to figure out how these disparate themes connect in a non-logical way and how I can make that intuitively make sense to the reader. So, since I'm still excited about that, I still want to write stories.
GR: I was wondering about your actual writing process. You've got these tightly woven stories where the reader doesn't notice any of the transitions. The writing just flows seamlessly from flashback to narrative and back, and I was wondering how much you thought about structure while writing.
KSL: I guess I don't really think about structure all that much when I'm starting out. I've been telling my students lately that it's best to start blind, and I think this is something that I just realized about how I like to write. If I know too much about the structure of a story, or even where it's going in terms of character development, it's hard to start writing, so I'd rather not know that stuff in the beginning. As I work through it, I do start to think about the pieces that I'm trying to put together, especially in revision. I think I figure out my stories in revision. A lot of times I get to the end of a first draft and I sort of don't know what it's about. In trying to figure it out in revision the connections come together. When you're writing you intuitively understand that certain images make sense together but you don't know why in a conscious way. So the connections start out in the story in the first draft, and then in revision I have to bring them out a little bit more so that those connections make sense.
GR: If someone asked you, could you name what every story in this collection is “about?” When you go to revision is that one of your goals?
KSL: I think that it's good to have some things in a story that are unnamed, or that still feel just intuitive to you. I would never try to distill one of my stories down to “this is what it's about.” First I try and read it the way I read other people's stories. I go through the characters and think about the choices they make and why. It's almost like doing a therapy session on my characters. I try and figure out what's going on in the story on that level so that I can understand why certain things are happening. Then I can add just a little bit to make the connections a bit more clear. My favorite short story writer is Alice Munro, and when I read her stories a lot of times I finish and I don't completely “get it” in a conscious way, but she's illuminated just enough for me to make an intuitive sense of the story. On subsequent reads, then, I can more consciously grasp what the story's “about”, but the initial read maintains a sense of mystery or magic, and I like that.. That's what I aim for, though I don't know that I have quite accomplished it yet in my own work.
GR: Do you feel like you know when a story is done?
KSL: I think I do usually know when it's done, and this sounds weird to say, but it seems like it's about rhythm more than story. It's like you get to a certain place while writing and you feel like, “okay, there's only one more phrase left.” Then you have to pull it together at that point. If there's anything I worry about in my stories pretty consistently, it's that I don't tell enough. I don't want to go so far that I'm giving everything away, so I know that the story is ending if I stop short of that.
GR: I was talking about one of your stories in my class the other day. One of my students had written a story about a similar kind of character: a woman in a young marriage who was going a bit crazy. Some of the other students were suggesting that she add in some large event like burning the house down, and so we were talking about the quiet ending.
KSL: That's one of those things that people have said about my work, that it's quiet. To me, a quiet story is a good thing, but I never know if I should take it as a compliment when people say that. They could mean the stories are too passive, or that they don't make enough of a wave. At the same time though, I read certain writers who go for the big plot twist, or the raw and shocking event. Certain things can be done well, but then sometimes they can be taken too far. I see a lot of writers who are trying to shock me as a reader, and I just don't think shock is enough to carry a story. That's not life, really, it's not the life that I've lived anyway. There are ways to surprise a reader or evoke a response though in a beautiful, lovely way. That's the trick, to do it right, I think. It seems to me that there are some writers right now who are trying to pull off writing the edgy stuff, but are doing it without that quietness, and that's not what I look for in a story.
GR: How do you approach the beginning of a story?
KSL: I think it's important to have the tension there from the first page, but not necessarily the actual action or event. My goal when I'm starting a story is to build tension into the beginning. Although, I think with what I'm working on now, I'm playing with how much I can put in that's not necessary to the story. How long can I string it out just for the sake of the aesthetics of the writing? How long can a story function on the basis of good writing? I'm interested in that, and so I've been moving away from being so spare. I don't know if it's working or not. I've been keeping people like Alice Munro in mind, writers who give you ten pages of details that seem irrelevant until you get to the end of the story and then it all comes together.
GR: I really like the quiet endings and I was wondering if you ever had to answer questions like: Why this day in this person's life? What is irrevocably changed? It makes sense to me to think of these characters as having fault lines. It's as though they are undergoing these mini-changes, which happen every day. It doesn't necessarily have to be “this day”—other days will also cause shifts—but still it is an irrevocable change.
KSL: “Why this day” is one of my least favorite questions. When I was at a conference this summer, one of the workshop leaders asked that question about every story that came up. I kept thinking, I don't care why this day, why not this day? As long as I'm feeling the tension in the story, I don't want all that background stuff to be there. I'd rather have it present but unspoken. I'd rather feel it in the narrative than have the writer bog me down with it.
GR: Once you're out of graduate school and you don't really have that community of writers, how do you deal with that? Do you have people whom you e-mail work to?
KSL: For a long time I didn't have anyone, and I was just doing my own thing. Now I have a couple of friends who I've met since leaving graduate school who often read for me. It doesn't so much matter if they work in the same way I do, or if their work is like mine. It matters that they're good readers for me, and that they are readers who I really trust. The reason they're good readers is that they can see my vision for the story and they can help me get there. So I trade work over e-mail with them. I've always sent stuff to my mom, and I still do that. I send stuff to both of my parents, actually.
GR: How has your approach to writing changed since finishing the program at Davis ?
KSL: After the book came out, I had to change my feeling about writing, and ease up on my expectations for myself. I also had to think back and remember why I started writing back when I was sixteen. Other than that, I think the things that I'm focusing on in my work now are different. Your work does kind of come out of your life and as your life alters itself you have different fodder. I was newly married when I wrote this book, pretty newly married, anyway. I had basically just left home. I was in this weird place of figuring out what it meant to be a wife. I had this concept of myself as an individual and as a woman, and then I had this concept of what wifehood was. I felt like I had to be on guard all the time so that being a wife didn't erase my identity as an individual, even though my husband isn't like that. I think that kind of fear is built into us as a generation almost, because of the place that we're in as women now. So I think a lot of those concerns particularly influenced these stories. Now I've been married a long time, and it's worked itself out, so I'm writing about different things. In terms of settings, I still write about the Northwest a lot, although, having left California I've started writing about California , too. I guess I'm drawing now from the periods when we lived in Davis and in Southern California .
GR: You said that you weren't really thinking about these stories as a larger unit when you were writing them. Did you ever think about putting them together as a book?
KSL: When I came to Davis I thought that my thesis would be a novel, because, you know, that's what you do. I thought, well, I'm a graduate student now, so I have to be serious about this, and a serious thing is a novel. I kept trying to write novels and I would bring them to workshop and people would say, “Well this is a story.” And so they kind of evolved that way. I was sending them out to magazines and things while I was in school, but I was still thinking of them as individual pieces. They were all rejected a lot of times, from big and small magazines and well-thought-of and less-well-thought-of places. Everyone rejected them. That's another thing I tend to say when I do readings, because I think that's a validating thing to hear. If a story is being rejected all the time it doesn't mean that the story has to come to an end. Maybe it will still find a place.
GR: How do you feel about the degree now? Has having a master's in creative writing helped you to find jobs, or has having the book been most useful?
KSL: I go back and forth about the degree in that there have been a couple of times where I've interviewed for positions and the interviewers have wished I had an MFA. I'm sure that's not why I either did or didn't get particular jobs, but I think it's there in the back of people's minds. On the other hand, though, I feel like I got so much out of being at Davis . My writing is totally different. I feel like I found my voice while I was here and I figured out what I wanted out of my stories. That's all really valuable and I wouldn't change that. When I left, I did get adjunct work right away. I haven't really looked that much for jobs beyond adjunct work, so I don't know if the book would make a huge difference. I hear that it would; I don't know if that's true or not. I think that there seems to be a trend right now toward looking for writers who have PhDs in literature actually, because money is tight and departments want you to be able to do multiple things. The feeling I've come to is that you go to a program where you can be with people you want to work with, where you have time to do your work, and a community of writers who will nurture what you want from your work. That's all you can really ask for. The rest of it is not guaranteed. I feel like I got a lot out of Davis , and I wouldn't trade the experience.
GR: Can you talk more about how your work has changed? You mentioned that it's cleaner now, but are there any other fundamental differences between what your work is like now and how it was when you came into the program?
KSL: The things I was writing when I got here were imitations of other people's work, and I think that's a necessary stage to go through. I think it's a common thing that you have to do to figure out what your voice is and where you fit. That's what I was doing when I got here. As far as the influence of the program on my writing goes, I think part of it was having the professors that I had, and part of it was hearing what everybody else was doing in workshop. While I was here I figured out what my voice was and the kinds of stories that I wanted to read. I was introduced to writers I hadn't read before because the professors could see where I was headed and they would recommend books to me. I remember reading some of those things and it was as though a part of my brain opened up, and that was really useful for me, too. The whole aesthetic of my writing changed while I was here. I figured out what I did that was different, I guess. Having validation from other people, once I started doing what I thought was me, and not someone else, was really helpful too.
Kirsten lives in South Bend, Indiana with her husband where she teaches courses in English literature at Saint Mary's College and Indiana University, South Bend . She is working on a second collection of short stories.