Adam Haslett: We’re living in such a bizarre time, and I’m wondering, for you - how has it been to try to be an imaginative and fiction writing individual now? Have you been able to at all? You’ve been writing nonfiction about Breonna Taylor, as well as other nonfiction - when the stakes are what they are, and the things are so immediate, what’s the role of fiction in your life?

ZZ Packer: I’m writing tons of nonfiction now, though I’m still writing fiction. In terms of the role and the special time that we’re in - this summer, after George Floyd and before that Ahmaud Arbery and before that Breonna Taylor, this is something that the country has been wrestling with for a long time, but not wrestling hard enough with.

I’ve been writing this novel about Reconstruction and Buffalo Soldiers, and reckoning with all the things that have already happened, which we’re now seeing again. It seems as though the whole country is now trying to have a sincere reckoning with race and the history that it’s played in America. The seeds of everything we’re experiencing right now were laid in Reconstruction. The way kids learn history in school, it’s like, okay, there was slavery and then we had the civil rights movement and that’s that. But one of the things I feel we can do through fiction is tell these stories in a way that we can sort of see them more fully.

The role of fiction has been that of illumination. We can always go to nonfiction and learn facts and dates and what happened, but to be able to incorporate those facts and process them requires, I think, literature. I don’t want to say that fiction writers have an appointed role, nor responsibility, because I don’t like that word for fiction writers. But I do think that we can be a very important source of light, which is why I use the word “illumination”.

Nonfiction has been a place where I can leave aside some of the work that is being a fiction writer. There is kind of a relief in nonfiction. Nicole Hannah Jones talks about how history is calming for her - for me, though the facts of nonfiction can be infuriating, the writing of it can be calming because I’m getting the chance to address and be in conversation with those facts. Whereas fiction, to me, feels - I hesitate to say this, but slightly more sacred. I think the general public thinks of being a fiction writer as “oh you can just imagine whatever you want, it’s so great, I get to write a novel”. But it is a lot of mental work, and you can’t do certain things in fiction that you can do in nonfiction.

Tara Hurtley (undergraduate student): Do you find yourself using a lot of the same elements in both your nonfiction and fiction writing? Or is there a big divide?

ZZ: I feel as though you use the same tools. Sometimes I feel adrift in nonfiction - though I know what I want to say, I'm not always exactly sure how I should say it. Editors will tell me, you’re a writer, it doesn’t matter! A writer is a writer. Sometimes fiction writers are the best nonfiction writers, because they already have a sense of story. The toolbox is the same, but what you’re constructing is different.

In terms of distance between the two - I’ve let there be a little bit of a divide, because I’ve been so concerned with what’s been happening over the last four years. I’ve been so compelled to write nonfiction because it feels like I'm doing something. Not to say that I'm not doing something if I write fiction, but it almost feels palliative in a way. I'm solving the problem for me, of course, but the general world might not care.

I also just love writing nonfiction because there’s a part of me that’s very nerdy and research-oriented--researching things is a fun thing for me, and it feels like work. Nonfiction tends to fill that need for me more immediately. Of course, fiction requires research even when you’re not doing something historical. There is always research. But because fiction is an emotional terrain, one of your tools as a fiction writer is literally yourself. Even outside of writing something that seems autobiographical, it is using your capacity to learn from your experiences, your capacity to feel certain emotions, your capacity to render those emotions. So you can get tired being a fiction writer! Nonfiction feels less tiring than using myself.

Katie Schorr (MFA student): I’m currently teaching your work, we’ve been looking at the openings of all of your stories in Drinking Coffee Elsewhere. All of the opening sentences are perfectly crafted, and some of them include so much detail that it’s just like an entire world in one sentence. So I’m curious about the process of getting there. Additionally, my students have been curious about your editing process and your approach to sentences in general.

ZZ: Maybe I shouldn’t admit this in public--but a lot of my sense of opening has to do with fear! I try to think of myself as a fairly fearless person, but I will say that in writing I definitely am not without fear. The locus of writing: it conjures up fear. And my fear is that I can’t proceed with a story until I feel as though I have the opening. I need the opening for myself. It’s not even just for the reader, initially - it’s for me to feel confident to go along with the rest of the story.

I place a great value on sentences. A well-written sentence encapsulates not just the writer’s wit, but sharply captures the character, so that they’re inseparable. I think the reason most writers, especially literary writers, get into writing is they are just...entranced by the magic of well-written sentences. It’s hard for me to just write down a sentence and leave that sentence alone, you know? Like it takes everything I have right now to like not edit the book that is actually published that I was just reading to you. To me, editing is a constant conversation with your sentences.

Stories don’t ever feel entirely finished to me. I feel as though, part of what makes most good writers good writers is their capacity to revise. That’s where much of writing is - in the slog of revision and rewriting. So in terms of when do I feel as though it’s finished: sometimes people have to take things away from me for me to feel as though they’re finished.

Adam: As they say, “work is never finished, it’s only abandoned.”

ZZ: Right, or snatched away from you.

Max Lebo (MFA student): I was wondering if you could speak to how you view endings in your work, and maybe a little bit about the process of finding the right ending.

ZZ: Endings are tricky. It may seem obvious, but so much of the ending depends on what is in the middle. As Ian Forrester said, people have problems with middles. The beginning may be the engine, but the middle is actually doing the bulk of the work in the story. So I often feel that if the middle doesn’t work, the ending doesn’t work.

To me, the ending has to be much more than just a resolution. A lot of people are taught Freitag’s triangle and the theory of “plot” tend to think, ok, here’s the beginning, then it goes up, then the climax, then the denouement and then everything has been resolved. What I like about endings (and maybe this is just a preference) is not just for the middle to be anything rising, but an exploration, an excavation.

I believe it was Eudora Welty who said that Checkov revolutionized the short story by converting it to the psychological, rather than just an “event smorgasbord”. I feel as though once you have excavated as much as possible, and put your character through the psychological paces of the story, then the ending must go beyond a resolution. It must be resonant in some way, and it has to touch upon all the psychological (for lack of a better term) wounds that have been opened. To me, a good ending always does more than simply tie everything up with a neat bow.

Some people have told me, I was surprised by your ending. Your stories don’t seem to actually end. i think of that as a compliment even if they weren’t intending it as such.

Adam: Because of what we spoke about in the beginning, I’m wondering - As a literary fiction writer and a kind of conscience and a soul, how does it feel for you being a Black woman writing now? When we were in grad school together, I remember being the only out gay person in our class, you were the only African American woman. I guess I'm just curious about whether it feels that things have changed for you as a literary citizen in the last 20 years.

ZZ: Whenever I see Adam, we always feel young because I remember us in grad school. You’re right, it’s been a while. Then, the literary world was very much a Ray Carver world, and his literary descendants. I'm not anti-Ray Carver, his stories are great, but there was this whole culture of how things were done, and what writing was taken seriously. As you said, it was definitely very boozy, white-male centered, very macho. There was a way in which the workshop world put this on a pedestal so it was almost like nothing else could flourish unless it was by way of tokenism in relation to that worldview. We were constantly working against that as a general template.

Now, what’s so great is that there are so many people in the game, because of who came before us. A lot of people have done a lot to make it so that it’s not just one voice.

It goes beyond identity. Of course, we need more writers from a wide range of culture, that’s so important. But it’s also about the changing of the culture. Oftentimes the two have to be concurrent for that change to occur.

I used to teach at VONA (Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation) - it was what I most looked forward to in the summer. Now I teach at Kimbilio over the summer, which is all African/African diaspora. That’s very important to me. Don’t get me wrong, I like reading a Cheever story, or Carver, or Tobias Wolff, et cetera. But Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie once spoke about the danger of a single story: one narrative can’t dictate everything. It does feel that now, the general public and writing world and publishing industry are more aware of this, and that's a positive thing.

I do feel in 20 years we’ve come a long way, and I'm excited by that. But, if we remember what was happening this summer, a part of that racial reckoning was seeing African American writers not getting nearly the same book advances as white peers. So yes, we can pat ourselves on the back for some stuff, but there’s still such a long way to go. Even the structure of some of these institutions can harbor the potential to be racist. It requires vigilance. We can’t just rest.

Adam: Well, speaking of resting, I think we may rest our conversation here. We’re all so glad that you’re here.

ZZ: I’m so happy to be at Hunter! Thank you to everyone who joined.

This interview is comprised of transcribed excerpts from a reading and conversation with ZZ Packer, as part of Hunter College’s Distinguished Living Writers Series. To watch a recording of the full event, click here.