ZZ Packer’s collection Drinking Coffee Elsewhere was published in 2003. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker (where she was launched as a debut writer), Harper’s, and Story, have been published in The Best American Short Stories, and have been read on NPR’s Selected Shorts. Packer is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. A graduate of Yale, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and the Writing Seminar at Johns Hopkins University, she has been a Wallace Stegner-Truman Capote fellow at Stanford University and currently teaches at San Francisco State University.
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Drinking Coffee ElsewhereStoriesFrom"Brownies"
By our second day at Camp Crescendo, the girls in my Brownie troop had decided to kick the asses of each and every girl in Brownie Troop 909. Troop 909 was doomed from the first day of camp; they were white girls, their complexions a blend of ice cream: strawberry, vanilla. They turtled out from their bus in pairs, their rolled-up sleeping bags chromatized with Disney characters: Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Mickey Mouse; or the generic ones cheap parents bought: washed-out rainbows, unicorns, curly-eyelashed frogs. Some clutched Igloo coolers and still others held on to stuffed toys like pacifiers, looking all around them like tourists determined to be dazzled.
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Drinking Coffee ElsewhereStoriesFrom"Our Lady of Peace"
At the end of the first week of teaching, Lynnea found herself having to raise her voice to get their attention—something she wasn’t used to doing. They didn’t quite yell and scream, but their collective whimsical talk was the unsettling buzz of a far-off carnival. When she sent them to the principal’s office, they snickered and bugged out cartoon eyes, heading toward the office for a few paces, then bolting in the opposite direction. She found herself sharking the room, telling duos here and there that they should not be talking about their neon fingernail polish or the Mos Def lyrics in front of them, but the novel at hand, Their Eyes Were Watching God. They were quiet for a moment, controlling their grins as if they were hiding something live and wriggling between the covers of their notebooks.
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Drinking Coffee ElsewhereStoriesFrom"Speaking in Tongues"
You could only truly speak in tongues when all worldly matters were emptied from your mind, or else there was no room for God. To do that, you had to be thinking about him, praising him, or singing to him. She had tried at church and she had tried at home, but nothing worked. In her room, she would genuflect, pushing her head against her bed ruffle, reciting scriptures, praying, singing, concluding it all with a deep, waiting silence. But nothing would come out. Her only solace was that Marcelle was three years older and hadn’t spoken in tongues either.
Drinking Coffee Elsewhere:Stories
“Young writers, naturally enough, write about young characters. Drinking Coffee Elsewhere is not really limited by this. Instead, there is a sense of a talented writer testing and pushing at those limits, ringing as many changes as possible within her fictional world. It is a world already populated by clamoring, sorrowing, eminently knowable people, and with the promise of more to come.” —Jean Thompson, The New York Times
“Packer's handling of race is consistently impressive. While some writers choose to bang the concept on an anvil, and others avoid the subject altogether, this 30-year-old manages to work it into nearly every story without coming off like a public service announcement. But without question Packer's strength is her characters, and when she's at her best she writes like a boxer, capturing everything she needs in rapid-fire sentences.” —Marc Nebitt, The Washington Post [on Drinking Coffee Elsewhere]
”A captivating eye for detail . . . a bold and often thrilling usage of language and style.” —The San Francisco Chronicle [on Drinking Coffee Elsewhere]
”A true cause for celebration for those of us who feel that fiction exists to crack the world open and inspire us with new love for it. Funny, fierce, verbally energetic, deeply compassionate—Packer is a wonderful new writer, who somehow manages to indict the species and forgive it all at once.” —George Saunders [on Drinking Coffee Elsewhere]
Selected Works
