![]() And even with poems, which gather so much of their power and momentum from the charge of language.still there's a way in which the poem doesn't have to be intense if the poet doesn't want it to be intense. I mean, you can have a novel that is intense but it doesn't necessarily have to be defined by its intensity, whereas I think with short stories it has to be. But with the short stories, the form, to me, is so marvellous because it lends itself to intensity, which the novel necessarily doesn't. That's been scaring me a little bit because I am working on a novel, and not because I'm under any pressure to do so but just because I was working on it concurrently with the short stories. When I spoke to ZZ Packer at last year's Sydney Writers' Festival, I asked her if writing short stories allowed her to work in ways that she couldn't with a longer form. Michael Shirrefs: ZZ Packer, reading an excerpt from her short story titled 'Brownies', which first appeared in Harpers magazine and was selected for The Best American Short Stories 2000. There are tales of isolation, of misfits, and in the opening story, called 'Brownies', a gathering of Brownie troops at Camp Crescendo becomes the stage for playing with ideas of racial tension, social stereotypes and self-examination.īefore you hear a conversation with ZZ Packer, here she is reading an excerpt from 'Brownies'. There are numerous stories that show the crucial, but often abusive, role of the evangelical church in black American society. There's a tale called 'Ant of the Self', where an academically talented boy gets caught up in his dysfunctional father's world, dragged off to Washington to attend Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March, to help his father sell exotic birds. ZZ Packer's debut collection of stories titled Drinking Coffee Elsewhere gathers together stories that have previously been published in places like Harpers and The New Yorker, and one was even chosen for The Best American Short Stories 2000, edited by John Updike. They're set throughout the eastern and southern states of the US, and though she places the reader in African-American communities looking through African-American eyes, the assorted patinas of race, colour, gender and religion seem to recede as really stark universal aspects of human nature start to be revealed. She lives in San Francisco but her stories are not sunny west-coast tales. Her real name is Zuwena, Swahili for 'good', but she says 'ZZ' was always easier to say and has stuck. Her tales seem so understated, but her skill is in the way she can target those very human moments of fragility, those quiet, unnamed uncertainties that we can never quite admit to, and certainly can't find the words for. She has a talent for writing restrained stories that catch the reader off guard. But this week we meet the delightful and very talented American short story writer ZZ Packer. I'm Michael Shirrefs, with you while Ramona Koval dazzles audiences and authors at the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival in Montreal, and you can expect Ramona to return with a fine collection of conversations. Michael Shirrefs: Hello and welcome to Books and Writing on Radio National.
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