Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum returns to her favorite fictional family in latest short story collection

Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum, who will be a writing mentor for Whitworth University’s new, low-residency Master of Fine Arts program, said that, despite trying to write about other things, her work always returns to isolation. Her latest short story collection, “Outer Stars,” is no exception. The collection won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in short fiction, and will be released by University of North Texas Press on Saturday.

“So even in these stories where family is at the center of identity and location and also is, in a lot of ways, the good part of life, the part of life that makes the characters feel alive … at the same time, I think they feel isolated within their families always,” Sundberg Lunstrum said.

One family in particular has a lasting place in Sundberg Lunstrum’s work. “Outer Stars” is her fourth story collection; her debut novel, “Elita” was also published this year. Though the Seattle author loved the experience of publishing a novel, she thinks of herself as a short story writer, and was excited to return to the form.

Characters Otto and Ilse, as well as their children, have had short stories in every collection Sundberg Lunstrum has written, and she’s been writing about them for 25 years. In “Outer Stars,” they appear in the short stories “Revision” and “At the Last.”

In “Revision,” Sundberg Lunstrum wrote, “‘Hold on,’ she says to the man she’s traveling with – Joel – who is a few paces ahead. ‘You’re walking so fast. We won’t miss it. God knows, everybody sane is still in bed.’ He turns, and a look she hasn’t seen on a man since the last years of her marriage crosses his face. I’m weary, she remembers her ex-husband saying when she questioned this expression in the months before their divorce. I’m just weary. But, of course, that was always a lie. Fatigue, she’s come to understand, is not the same as regret.”

“That family is the closest to my own in lots of ways,” Sundberg Lunstrum said. “Not that the things that happen to them are the closest to my own reality. It’s fictional, but there are elements of those characters that feel very close to me, and it’s like a family that spans generations now.”

For Sundberg Lunstrum, the characters from that family feel like old friends.

“I feel like I really, really know who they are, what drives the tension in their family, and also why they all love each other so much,” Sundberg Lunstrum said.

The titular story involves an unidentified environmental disaster that makes the air so unsafe people can’t venture outside. This separates a family physically that was already trying to negotiate their dynamics.

Sundberg Lunstrum chose the cover image by Adam Fung, who was a previous student and now an art professor at Texas Christian University, because she has always been a fan of his art, and, “he does a lot of work that highlights ecological questions and is related to the relationship people have with landscape,” Sundberg Lunstrum said. “And so when I published this book, which has several stories that are tied to ecological anxiety and ecological grief, and circle issues of climate change and how it affects people, I thought of his work.”

To preorder a copy of “Outer Stars,” visit the UNT Press website.