No. 9

Summer 2005

Being Part of the World: An Interview with ZZ Packer
Jeff Janssens and S. Zoe Wexler

ZZ Packer is the author of the short story collection, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, which was a New York Times Notable Book for 2003 and was nominated for the 2004 Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In 2000, the title story from the collection was included in The New Yorker's Debut Fiction issue. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. ZZ Packer is a graduate of Yale and the Iowa Writers' Workshop and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She is currently at work on a novel about Buffalo Soldiers

Jeff Janssens is an MFA candidate in fiction at the University of Pittsburgh.

S. Zoe Wexler is an MFA candidate in nonfiction at the University of Pittsburgh.


One of the first things we wanted to ask you about was your process. It seems like you kind of go against that stereotype about writers being alone all the time, and we hear you're very social and stay up late.

I do think that one aspect of being a writer, probably the biggest aspect of being a writer, is being a fully developed human being. By that, I don't mean being an adult, but being a person who is in the world and engaging in the world. So often people just think of the writer as being solitary and not spending any time in the world, but I think that would be impossible, you wouldn't get any new experiences, you wouldn't get to change your mindset about certain ideas, or even sometimes change your principles, which we think of as being deeply held beliefs. I think that if you get out there and hear other people talking, and are around them, and get to see how they operate, and how you operate around them, it gives you a lot of fodder for creating not just realistic fiction but fiction that can delve into the psyche of particular characters. So it's very helpful to be a part of the world. You have to be a part of the world to observe it.

In Drinking Coffee Elsewhere you get inside so many people's heads; you're able to write from each perspective. Is this tied to getting out, talking to people, meeting people?

Thanks for the compliment. Well, partly [those types of experiences help]. I think you can also make the case that some people just go out, think of what it's like to be a frat boy, for instance, but if your antennae aren't out there, you can be a social individual, but you won't necessarily pick up on anything that's going to give you any kind of sensibility of people, or what people's hidden motives are, or what people mean underneath what they say -- covert meanings behind whatever they are actually presenting to you. So the antennae have to be out there, but part of it is just empathizing. I mean, people just think of writing as being the technical aspect of putting one word behind another, but so much of it is just observational art. If your antennae aren't out there, if you don't have the kind of mind to analyze what you brought back from your journeys and your interactions with people, and a mind that can, after one's analyzed what people have done, to be able to synthesize it into a story, then without those kinds of talents, it's really kind of difficult to write anything that is meaningful, even if you can put one word after another in a very interesting, stylistic way.

One thing that interested me is how you really burst onto the scene, being named a New Yorker debut writer in 2000. Can you talk about that whole process?

To me, that particular magazine and particular issue, I hadn't thought of it really as a big deal, in terms of, Oh this will enable me to get my book published -- I hadn't really thought of it in that way because ever since I can remember, since I was interested in writing, I'd been sending things to The New Yorker. I'd been rejected every time until that point. I make a point of saving all of my rejection letters, not just as a kind of humbling experience or to further plot revenge against the people who rejected me, but because they are very instructional, and I'd learned to do cover letters -- I don't have to do that now, because I have an agent -- but I don't know how I came upon this method, but I would say, Well here's my story, I've read your magazine for a long time, I'm a young writer just starting out, if you have any suggestions, I would love to hear them. And that cover letter has garnered just a wealth of rejections, but ones that have fortunately had a lot of great advice on them -- these are people who don't know who you are and have never met you and are just interested in the work. So I've actually saved a number of rejections I've gotten from the New Yorker, and I've been submitting to the New Yorker ever since I was writing in college. So for me, the idea of getting in there was just great because it had been a goal for such a long time, almost unconnected to further dreams of publishing, which is something I'd set up as a kind of goal. So when they turned out to like the story, for the debut fiction issue, the story "Drinking Coffee Elsewhere," it was kind of sad for me because I couldn't find it in me to revise that particular story. And that wasn't because I was lazy or anything, but because I just didn't know in terms of what the story demanded, what I would need to do to fulfill what it needed. And so we were thinking of a real problem, more on the level of a psychological problem, instead of one that could be solved with better writing. So I wasn't prepared to work on it for a while -- I was prepared to not work on it for a while. So what my agent told me about that particular issue, I had by that point, a couple years later, I had started to fiddle around with a revision, really tentatively, and so when I turned in the revision, they liked that as well, but they didn't like it well enough, so I went back and forth with them, doing quite a few revisions, and they ended up taking it. So that was a really interesting process. It wasn't like, Gosh I must be very dumb because I've had to do all these revisions with them. But I'd gone to see George Saunders, who is a writer who I really admire, and after the reading, I talked to him and he talked to his process with The New Yorker, and they told him to cut this many column inches, and so he did, and he said, Oh, now the story is great! And I had the same feeling with my story, that I was so glad they made me do that, because now I feel like it's very tight. But then very nonchalantly, the editor for the magazine back then told me, Okay, cut some more. But if they do like a story, they do want it pruned to their kind of specifications in a way. A different process altogether was "The Ant of the Self," which came out a couple of years after "Drinking Coffee Elsewhere" in The New Yorker. I submitted that one with another story, but they didn't like the other story, but they did like that one, and I think maybe one grounder for this is that when they decide on something, they're very quick, and so once it went through, they were like, Okay, this will be in next week's issue. And I was frightened because I'd only done one revision, but they're very idiosyncratic that way, but they're real masters at what they do. It's not even like a house style, it's almost a net result of having all these great minds together at one place.

Is revision a big part of your process?

The way I work, every draft I write, I'm wishing it could be the actual finished story. So it's not that I'm ever actually thinking, this is something I want to jot down in one night, and that's going to eventually end up working as the full story. I'm trying to write the full story when I write the draft, but the problem is, I just don't think that's possible for me at this point. So what happens is, the revision ends up being simply a matter of extra time spent because on the one hand, the draft that I want to write, I could never do that in one night, so you know, I'm doing that, and just trying to get to the end of the initial draft. So in a way, revision is even part of the drafting process because I can't even finish with the draft before going back to the first line, the first paragraph, and tinkering with that. So I just end up doing a lot of revision, almost naturally, because I'm not thinking of it necessarily as work until I get to ten discreet versions on my hard drive. And then I begin thinking, What if I do this to the ending, what if this half becomes sort of different, what if I change it to the first person or the second person, and all of that becomes this little struggle, and I'm trying to find my way into the story, and it's a very difficult thing to do. So then it becomes more of a psychic struggle, rather than an arduous task because it's repetitious, it really becomes a challenge for me because I'm dealing so much with mystery, and if you think about every day -- when you're a kid, you ask all these questions all the time, What is God, is He a woman, what does this mean, what is life about, or whatever -- and at some point, we all tend to stop asking those questions. But as a writer, you're kind of asking yourself questions similar to that all the time. Even if you're not asking those questions directly, you're dealing with similar mysteries. Why is this character great, what does her life mean, and why does she continue to make me think? It's a very existential question. It is very harrowing to deal with revision on that level.

One of the things about the story "Brownies" is that it brings up big questions about race, but it deals with them in the story in a way that is poignant and funny, and you don't usually hear those things together. I was kind of wondering about whether or not you set out in your process to address race in this, or whether it comes across in the process of writing the story.

I think that, to get back to the bigger question, the issue of race does affect all of us, especially in America, where so often that issue in all its myriad forms becomes subterranean, because no one really wants to talk about it or discuss it, and everyone kind of has their agendas to uphold, and no one really wants to show their cards in a way. So that's kind of the big thing I'm always thinking about, as a black person living in America, having lived through different environments, some of them all black, some of them all white, some of them mixed -- whatever I've observed. So for that particular story, I don't think I ever started out saying, It's going to be about race. And even if at the end I stated, This was about race, it would be false, because it's about so many different things. I almost can't help though to have the issue that I always think about to pervade a story, because I like to discover things that I'm writing, and I like to explore what I've seen in the world, through writing. And it doesn't have to be autobiographical or verbatim, but the sort of essential truth that I see in the world. So when I start writing a story, I am really just kind of trying to write a creation, and just thinking in terms of human beings, and something fascinating, and thinking of how I can create these fascinating characters. Usually I don't have a story until I have the beginnings of a character, and I can sort of see this character doing something, and I can ask myself questions like, Why is this character doing this, or what does this mean? If this was just the story, it would be very boring. So again I ask myself why I'm thinking of the character doing some particular thing, and the more I ask the question, the more it becomes a process of on the one hand craftsmanship, on the other hand magic, because on the one hand, I'm trying to make a character do specific things, and on the other hand, the character sometimes will do this, and sometimes can fly, and again, doing these things. And I knew at one point that I can see this character, this girl, who in the end turns out to be moral, Snot. You know, with this Brownie troop. It almost seems insignificant. I don't necessarily layer on significance by saying I'm going to layer on the issue of race. But I just kind of see what is so kind of strangely interesting about girls at that time in their lives, and how do they operate as this group, how do some of them get ostracized, so there are also some of these other things that are very interesting to me, having grown up as a girl.

You've obviously been successful with the short story form, but now you're writing a novel. Is this your first novel, and what are some of the differences in the process of writing a novel compared to a short story?

Well, it's not technically the first novel I've ever tried writing, and I would think of that process similar to the way I would think of writing a story, in terms of the drafts and the revisions. You know, the very first time I tried to write a novel, I think I was in college . . . I think I was 19, when I tried to write my first novel. And it was technically novel-length, and now I'm amazed that I even did it -- it was one of those things, the blessings of stupidity. Being naïve, you're doing these things without realizing the perils and dangers of them, and just how difficult it is. But it was by no means a novel in terms of being coherent. It was just a bunch of characters who were doing this, and it would change and be completely different, and I was just like, Okay, I'll just go back and fill it in later. Which was so great, because I wish right now that I had that ability, to say I'll just go back and fill it in later, because at least I'd be done with a novel! And you know, going back, and just working with what I had on the page.

So that was the first time I tried to work on a novel. I had several little attempts that didn't really go anywhere after that, but when I was at Iowa, I began thinking I was going to write a novel that was somehow about sharecroppers, and I didn't know what was going to happen, or anything like that. And then I had to put that aside, because nothing was happening with that. Although my agent did like it. To me, it's pretty easy to write 40 pages of something that sounds okay or promising, but I knew, knew in my heart of hearts, that it wasn't going anywhere, and no amount of ruminating over it or fiddling with it was going to solve that. But I still kept doing a lot of the research I had been doing for it, because I was interested in that period of time, post-Emancipation, when blacks became sharecroppers and what was happening in the south at that time. And also the personal connection was that both sides of my family, my grandparents were children of sharecroppers. So it was just very interesting – here were these people who were alive, my grandparents – and trying to figure out what their lives would have been like, and what made them the people that they are now. So there was that aspect of it too, and I found out a lot about that time period. But the more research I began doing, I began to ask myself questions once again. What would happen if blacks didn't necessarily move from the south to the north to escape the oppression of the sharecropping system. Did they move out west? I knew that some had, but it had been dealt with so cursorily in history.

I remember Mario Van Peebles directed this movie called Posse, which I don't think was a very good movie, but he got some heat for it, like in The New York Times, they reviewed it and said, Oh, there weren't blacks in the West, as if he tried to make it into this revisionist history where blacks were cowboys. And I just knew that not to be true. The more I kept reading about blacks in the West, I found out a third of them were cowboys, tons were in the cavalry and infantry. A third of the cowboys were blacks, a third were Mexicans-American, the Vacaros, and almost every term in western nomenclature comes from some combination of Spanish, or Spanish with other cultures that had some cattle culture. Anyway, the more I began reading about blacks in the west, the more fascinated I became because it was such a little talked about area, and America commonly views the West as its originating myth, like where America really took off. Before that, sure we had the Revolutionary War and the Declaration of Independence, but when people really think about America and what America stands for, they think of the Old West, and the cowboy as the American hero. That has been mythologized so much, so that there almost wasn't room for all these other people who went into making the west what it was. We usually think of the cowboy as this square-jawed, Anglo-Saxon man, cowboy hats, stoic -- all these images come to mind, but you never think that most of these men more often than not had to be small and wiry because they were dealing with horses and on horses all the time. You couldn't be a really huge man on a horse, it would be really difficult. You don't really think of the fact that all of the saddlers, and all of the people who were wrangling a lot of these horses and breaking them and dealing with cattle were Mexican-American. You didn't think of them as blacks who, in some ways for the first time, had a degree of freedom because out in the West, things depended on whether you lived or died, it wasn't like the East or the South, where you had life based on agriculture or industry. So if you were a black hired hand, you did eat with the other men. If you didn't, if you just said you were walking off, they'd lose one cowhand and they might have lost a very valuable friend. And so the West had its own rules, and people just sort of forget that was the case. It's almost as if American culture only has room for a few defining characteristics that make up something, and anything else that adds any complications becomes too much, or muddies the situation for people. They want them all romantic. They don't want to think about Nate Love, who was a black cowboy, or Deadwood Dick, who was actually black. I guess I'm digressing terribly.

So my novel is about the Buffalo Soldiers out in the West. And in terms of the differences between writing a novel and a short story, I would say that the novel has taken me to places I probably couldn't have gone in a short story. Like just being able to go on that journey and find out all about what went into making the American West. It is very difficult to do that with a short story, or say, I'm going to do this and here's one short story that comes about because of it. So that's one great advantage of the novel, but I'll say that the process definitely is different because I've been so sort of frustrated because it takes such a long time till you get anything down on paper. So that's been incredibly difficult. And also I do miss the richness of a short story. I constantly feel like I'm laying a groundwork of a novel, even though I'm nearing the end, and I won't even begin to see how the elements are working the way I want to, until a couple of revisions later. Whereas within a short story, within the draft I can begin to see what I'm trying to do, and in the revisions I can see it more clearly. With this, I'm not sure how many times it's going to take me to really see the vision crystallizing the way I would with a short story, so that's been really difficult and frustrating. But the rewarding part is having been brought along on this journey, which is just really incredible, and being immersed in this world, which otherwise I wouldn't have been able to be immersed in.

I was wondering about things you read recently, or while you were forming your voice as a writer, that you wished you had written yourself.

Toni Morrison frequently writes things I wish I had written myself. Right now I'm discovering this writer, Peter Carey, I feel kind of guilty saying I'm just now discovering him because he's been around for quite some time, and I'm reading this book, The True History of the Kelly Gang, and on every page I'm discovering stuff I wish I'd written. And the way in which he is so confident and bold and solid with the storytelling of that book is really amazing. And it's just so rare for a book to hit all the right notes, emotional intensity, really delving into the world of the intellect, but not in a way that is deliberately off-putting or cleverish, and this real sort of psychological drama, and in the midst of that, plot – which we, as literary fiction writers, tend to undervalue. And characters, we have great characters that tend to dictate the plot in a way. If you're just looking at it the way E. M. Forster looks at it as a group of events, a few discreet moments in time, that have some sort of relevance, then he really does that, he gets to these moments in time, which sequentially, one could not have been put in the place of another without authoring the outcome, or without authoring the psychological journey of that particular narrator. So he's a person I'm reading, I'm reading very slowly, because I'm hoping that eventually I'll learn a lot about what it means to write a novel from reading that book. But there's so many people -- Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky -- I really wish I could have written something like The Brothers Karamazov. I'm not sure when another Invisible Man will come along. But there are some people who are out there who are really great writers that I admire. Colson Whitehead, I mean, I write completely differently than him, but I really admire his stuff. Some of the people are like half a generation above me, like Lorrie Moore or Stuart Dybek, who I really admire. Junot Diaz, I do love a lot of his short stories, and everyone is just waiting for the next fiction piece to come out from him. And Francine Prose, I really admire because she's able to write really compelling fiction, and very compelling non-fiction, she just seems like this sort of public intellectual who is out and about and is constantly writing, and I don't know how she keeps it up and how it's so great. There's so many people, James Alan McPherson, the list could just go on.

Last night, when Faith Adiele introduced your reading, she indicated that the Iowa Writers' Workshop was a place where a person could get completely immersed in their writing and the writing community but also have a lot of fun at the same time, and she talked about some of the good times you had there. Can you talk about your experience at Iowa?

It was interesting because there were so many people there -- people think of it as being a very exclusive kind of program, but you can't be that exclusive if you have 100 MFA students at any given time. So one function of having so many students there is that you have a kind of mini metropolis there, a lot of the people come from many different places, and you're in Iowa City, which is a relatively small town, so you end up bumping into people all the time, seeing them when you go shopping. I think the great aspect about it is, so what if there are ten people you can't stand? More likely than not, you'll find ten people that you really bond with and gel with and who can be good critics of your work, and you hope that you can be the same to them. So that's really great, I mean, it's almost like a law of averages. At some point you're going to meet up with someone that you click with, and it is fun because it is a very social place. You can be incredibly social, but you can also say at any given time, "I can't do this because I'm working on a story," and everyone will understand, whereas I think the majority of people in the rest of the world, as I'll call it, if you're going to say, "I've got to write," they just don't take that seriously, and oftentimes people will come over to your house or call you in the middle of the day, just because they think you're constantly available because you're a writer. People who are there (at Iowa Writers' Workshop) understand that time is sacred. So it's great to be around so many people who understand what it's like to be a writer because they're a writer.

You spent a lot of time in writing workshops. How has it been post-workshop, having been so immersed in that support group for your writing? Do you still send stuff to friends, or have you grown enough to be able to discern enough things about your own writing?

I think once you're in workshop, one could get hooked to the idea of sending things to friends. And I think it's very helpful. I don't even think it's something that came out of workshops. I mean, for all time, anyone who's been writing has wanted to find another opinion for what their work is like. Even if you think of the salons in Europe, even it wouldn't have technically been a workshop, people would read each other's works. And even in the art world, people would show their paintings to one another and get feedback on it. So, it's not anything that I think would go away if all workshops were to go away. And thus, even though I'm out of workshop, when I do have pieces, I do still want to get feedback on them. So we've devised ways of doing that, some of them very informal, just friends who had been in workshop with me before, even people who aren't writers, sometimes it's helpful to show things to them, just to get a sense of what a reader thinks about a work, without putting on the gloss that one learns how to put on in workshop, without adding the vocabulary to tiptoe around things, or that acts as a bludgeoning hammer for other things. And so it's really useful to show things to people. At this point, since I've been out of workshop for a while, I've discovered that while working on this novel, I just really want people to read it. I have this group, and I didn't start it, but kind of tried to revive it when it sort of floundered for a bit, and now there's about nine of us. We read each other's stuff, and kind of give each other deadlines, and provide each other support. And it's in a very warm environment. We eat, drink sometimes, and it's not harsh like workshops, but it does have the benefits of getting your work critiqued, and also getting support when you need it.

Copyright 2005, Jeff Janssens and S. Zoe Wexler

nidus is an online publication supported by the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh's English Department.