Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum’s ‘Elita’ brings readers to fictionalized McNeil Island; Seattle mom part of Get Lit! Festival

Early in motherhood, author Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum would note her child’s language acquisition in a journal, combining her sensitivities as a writer and an educator – Sundberg Lunstrum teaches seventh-grade English.

“I was really fascinated by the way that the words he would say and the way he would describe things were not necessarily an exact duplicate of what I was telling him,” Sundberg Lunstrum said. “There’s some amount of direct knowledge that kids get, or social knowledge that they just base on the model that we give them, but then they’re also often translating or putting together things that make a sort of literal sense to them, but are not exactly how we describe the world. And I felt like language was this really wonderful window into understanding his vision and his thought process.”

Sundberg Lunstrum is featured in three events for Get Lit! Festival, which runs Thursday through Saturday. Sundberg Lunstrum will be one of the authors at Pie & Whiskey on Thursday, a panelist for a lecture about writing silences on Saturday morning, and one of the authors for Foray for the Arts on Saturday evening.

Though the characters in “Elita,” Sundberg Lunstrum’s first novel and fourth book, are fictional, Sundberg Lunstrum gave Bernadette the habit of writing down her child’s words, as well.

“Acquisitions: Ball, weed, robin, sweet.

“Two-word phrases used correctly within situational context: Willie wants. Go out? No, this.

“Observations: Subjects encountered more than once are easily remembered and named with near 100% accuracy. Example: When we saw a robin in a cherry tree on campus today, Willie pointed to the spot across the quad where we had also spotted one yesterday, suggesting image recollection. She said, ‘Bird,’ and I responded, ‘Robin,’ which she then repeated. The hard r remains a developing sound. She often substitutes a b for an r, particularly when the r falls at the start of a word,” Sundberg Lunstrum wrote.

Bernadette is an academic who lectures on childhood development, her specialty language acquisition. Cataloging her daughter’s words was a way to stay connected to her profession when motherhood was muffling her intellectual curiosity.

“I was like Bernadette, very frustrated that I wasn’t getting any of my own academic or creative work done, really, during that time period,” Sundberg Lunstrum said. “But an outlet for that sense of curiosity and creativity for me was to closely observe his development and to try to document it so that maybe when I had time, I could make something of it.”

“Elita” begins with Bernadette listening to an interview between a detective and two Elita prison guards. During their break, they found a girl.

In “Elita”, the prison guard tells the detective, “Like we already said, it was that one came at us. She came at us like one of them mad dogs, and that’s when we caught her – only then. Self-protection.”

The social worker gives this girl her name, Atalanta, for the girl in Greek mythology raised by a bear. The social worker finds Bernadette’s information and brings her onto the case, hoping Bernadette will be able to teach the girl to speak. From there, the book unravels as a mystery that tackles questions of parenting, language, feminism, childhood and agency.

Elita is a fictionalization of McNeil Island, which used to be residential, but now is the site of a special commitment center for sexually violent predators, as well as the Nisqually Reach Aquatic Reserve. A place where there are remnants of the old town, but where access isn’t allowed.

Sundberg Lunstrum has Pacific Northwest roots, and now lives in Seattle, but wasn’t fully aware of McNeil Island and its history until 2020.

“My husband convinced me that we should buy a pocket sailboat,” Sundberg Lunstrum said. “So we actually drove over to Idaho and bought a boat that had previously been, I think, on Coeur d’Alene, trailered it back over to the side of the mountains and started putting it in the water in Puget Sound, and camped out of it most weekends that summer of 2020 with our two kids and our dogs. I got to see Puget Sound in a way I had never seen Puget Sound before. I thought I knew the region really deeply, but from the water, you discover so many things you just haven’t had access to from land.”

For Sundberg Lunstrum, setting is a natural place for her writing to begin.

“When I was a kid, my family moved because of my father’s job about every year or two,” Sundberg Lunstrum said. “So, I never know when people ask me, ‘Where are you from?’ I never know how to really honestly answer that.

“I think what that pretty transient childhood did for me was it made me a really keen observer of place, because when you’re always in a new place, like we talked about with Atalanta, it’s part of your survival technique, in some sense, to really pay attention to the place you’re in.”