That saying about hindsight being 20/20 could not ring more true on the fifth anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In retrospect, the hardships that haunted daily life then also manifested unprecedented opportunity. No one knows that better than Seattle-based educator and author Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum, who was a K-12 teacher with two elementary-aged children in 2020. At the time, remote learning was uncharted waters, and she had a classroom of students and her own kids at home to support her through it.
Avid travelers, her family was temporarily grounded for months of quarantine, leading to a surprisingly practical pandemic purchase: a 24-foot pocket sailboat, out of which they could camp on the water of Puget Sound’s many channels and bays.
The author and her family cruised into Coupeville Wharf as she worked on ‘Elita.” Photo by Nathan Lunstrum
Out of the quietude
“It was so quiet,” Sundberg Lunstrum said in a recent interview. “All other obligations fell away. I also had all these pressing worries watching my students be in isolation, watching my kids be in isolation.”
“We inadvertently unschooled one of my kids because, as a fifth grader, she couldn’t do Zoom school,” Sundberg Lunstrum adds. “A lot of beautiful things came out of that. On the other hand, there were many, many concerns about socialization and academics. The question was, what is the cost of that kind of freedom?”
In 2020, it became a core question for Sundberg Lunstrum, which led her to write “Elita,” her first novel, which hits bookstore shelves on January 15. The book explores the many questions Lunstrum nurtured as a mother and educator during “the silence of that year.”
Sundberg Lunstrum has published three books of short story collections. Though she originally meant for “Elita” to follow that tradition, fellow writers encouraged her to develop a full novel.
Story synopsis
The novel follows Bernadette Baston, a bright, ambitious single working mother who moves to Seattle with her young daughter Willie. Her husband Fred left them years prior, and what is meant to be a new start for the duo initiates unrest in Bernadette’s professional and personal lives. Fred reappears, destroying the equilibrium she and Willie have perfected. The misogynistic society of 1951 holds her back from doing the meaningful work she strives to complete as a scholar of language acquisition. And, of course, there is no lack of judgment about her shortcomings as a mother through the lens of a male-dominated workforce and society at large.
Bernadette pushes forward in her research, leading to an assignment on Elita, a small island in south Puget Sound. A child is found in the harsh landscape, alone, non-verbal, and under-socialized. Her ferocious nature lends her the name Atalanta, a nod to a huntress and heroine in Greek mythology. The feral girl of unknown origin has her own ward in the island’s prison, overseen by a consortium of handlers: a warden inexperienced with child development and care, a court-ordered guardian who, though a working woman herself, poses a threat to Bernadette’s position and the task at hand; and a detective who may be Bernadette’s only buoy to self-preservation and unlocking Atalanta’s secret history.
Based on real Washington locations
The prison and its island home were based on real-life McNeil Island and the federal penitentiary that operated there for over a hundred years. The property then transferred ownership to the Washington State Department of Corrections and served as a corrections center for another three decades. It closed in 2011. Its neighbor, Anderson Island, also inspires the novel as fictional Adela, the sister island to Elita, that acts as both a sanctuary and a revelatory location in Bernadette’s investigation.
For the author, setting her novel in western Washington was a no-brainer. Sundberg Lunstrum spent her childhood moving around the country, but she notes Seattle was “always home base.” As an adult, she spent time on the East Coast, the Midwest, and California before the constant homesickness compelled her to move back to Emerald City in 2012. It wasn’t until the pandemic hit that she and her family began exploring Puget Sound from a new perspective on that 24-foot pandemic buy.
“There’s so much you can see only from the water that I hadn’t known before,” said Sundberg Lunstrum. “It was from that experience of camping out of this sailboat that I discovered McNeil and Anderson [Islands]… You might be alone there for hours and hours or even days. No one will pass you. It feels very remote, even though it’s not. This sounds dramatic, but I found myself thinking so much about the sky and the light and the water in those days out on the boat. That sense of overwhelming beauty found its way into the book, too.”
Parts of the author in the story
Like her protagonist, Sundberg Lunstrum is also an educator. For 15 years, she taught creative writing and English as a professor and adjunct professor, and she’s spent the last 10 years teaching middle school and high school. Though there are certainly differences between the artist and her creation, Bernadette’s struggle as a woman in the workplace was inspired by some of her own experiences as a woman in academia, particularly from “being a pregnant adjunct teacher or an adjunct with young infants and toddlers at home trying to manage childcare around a wild adjunct schedule that is never predictable and doesn’t pay very well.”
Bernadette is, in many ways, the ultimate modern leading lady, a strong and admirable feminist, even if the period in which the book is set has her pitted against a healthy patriarchy trying to hold her back. Sundberg Lunstrum cites her predilection for books set in the mid-twentieth century as inspiration for her novel’s setting. This also allows her “to explore the gender tensions that Bernadette faces,” which, she points out, still exist in modern society. In the novel, they exaggerated to reflect the era and the mindset of those operating against Bernadette.
In this sense, “Elita” is hard to classify, traversing literary genres while still serving its central story. The conundrum of Atalanta’s appearance and the subsequent search to uncover her past makes this a spell-binding mystery-thriller. The author’s attention to the era could appease fans of historical fiction. Bernadette’s struggle to maintain her family unit despite her husband’s frustratingly chauvinistic behavior makes it a taut family drama.
Kids are more capable than we give them credit for
Bernadette may be our lead, but Atalanta serves the novel’s thesis—and the reader’s main interest. The attempt to indoctrinate her back into society is not as smooth as her handlers anticipate, not because Atalanta is incapable but because the rules of her rehabilitation do not account for her past experiences and trauma. Regardless, there is hope in Atalanta’s story, which is one of strength and fortitude, a point the author says was the driving force behind writing this novel.
“As a K-12 teacher and a parent, I feel like young people are so often underestimated and dismissed,” said Sundberg Lunstrum.
“One of the things I really wanted to have come through in the book – through Atalanta and through Bernadette’s daughter Willie – is how much children see and know and are capable of that we, as adults, overlook,” she adds. “The capability and brilliance of children is something I’m hoping readers take away from the story. And resilience. We like to say that kids are not as resilient, but I’m with them every day, and I really disagree.”
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