Like the First Time

KIRSTEN SUNDBERG LUNSTRUM is the author of three collections of short fiction: This Life She’s Chosen, Swimming With Strangers, and What We Do With the Wreckage. Her stories have been recognized with a PEN/O. Henry Prize and the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, among other honors. She teaches high school and lives with her family near Seattle.

I WAS driving home from a backpacking trip in the Cascade Mountains when I got the call that my collection of stories had won the 2017 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and would be published by the University of Georgia Press. My family and I had retreated to the mountains that weekend seeking refuge from cell service and civilization. We hiked into a wilderness area, pitched our tent beside a lake so clear we could see the peat bottom through the tea-colored water, and in that forty-eight hours I