Life as the ‘it’ author, hip voice of the voiceless

The current take on writer ZZ Packer as hip, as a fresh voice of the disenfranchised, began edging toward critical mass when the chroniclers of style -- Vogue, Oprah Winfrey’s O magazine, Entertainment Weekly -- all played her up recently in photo spreads. That kind of stardust is cool, acknowledges Packer, whose debut collection of short stories, “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere,” was released in March. It’s not that she expected the attention, but she wasn’t taken aback either.

In the last year, Packer, 30, who lives in the Bay Area, has watched friends and other fellow graduates of the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop make the jump from the literati radar screen to mainstream recognition. Also, the literary press has marked her as a writer to watch since 2000, when the New Yorker included the title story from her new book in its debut fiction issue; another story was published in “Best American Short Stories 2000.” The buzz led to Packer’s contract with Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Putnam.

On a recent afternoon in West Hollywood, Packer bustles with intensity. In a candy-apple red sweater, her long hair pulled high, she hurries through a hushed hotel, the kind with oil paintings in elaborate gilt frames. With a huge grin, her lips outlined in brick red, Packer confesses that she’s “more used to Motel 6.”

At lunch in the hotel’s restaurant, her words spill out in fits and spurts; her sentences hurtle in one direction, then another while she pounds on the table to make a point or waves french fries in the air.

Recently, Packer, who teaches creative writing at Stanford University, has noticed the way that young writers from the Iowa workshop are beginning to make names for themselves outside literary circles. Last summer, friend and fellow grad Adam Haslett’s short story collection, “You Are Not a Stranger Here” (Doubleday), was a “Today” show book club selection, and, in the last couple of weeks, former Marine and workshop graduate Anthony Swofford’s memoir, “Jarhead” (Scribner), has landed on bestseller lists. (In February, the workshop, a graduate program of the University of Iowa, was awarded a National Humanities Medal by President Bush “for serving as an incubator of literary talent and critical brilliance.”)

Her eight stories are “highly personal yet sociopolitically acute,” wrote a critic in Kirkus Reviews. “A debut collection that cuts to the bone of human experience.” She gives voice mostly to young blacks, often framed in the complexities of politics or religion. Packer captures the struggles and imperfect speech of misfits, with characters including Brownie troop members in suburban Atlanta, a sister in a Pentecostal church and a Yale freshman named Dina who, in an orientation game, said that if she had to be an object, “I guess I’d be a revolver.”

In the title story, Dina remembers how she got through her mother’s funeral: “I imagined I was drinking coffee elsewhere. Some Arabic-speaking country where the thick coffee served in little cups was so strong it could keep you awake for days.”

Packer says it’s not hard to take the high-profile media coverage in stride “if you can keep a sense of yourself, that you are a writer, and that anything anyone says about you is sort of the construction of a persona.” Some people, in fact, wonder whether she dropped her first name, Zuwena, for the catchier “ZZ” as a marketing ploy, but she says she has gone by the nickname as long as she can remember.

Packer and her husband spend their spare time working on a two-story, four-bedroom ‘50s-style tract home in Pacifica, Calif., that they bought three years ago (she asks that her husband’s name not be mentioned because “he has his own life”). When she isn’t writing or taking on remodeling projects -- the couple put in a hardwood floor in the dining room and raised a ceiling -- Packer likes to catch a movie or head to San Francisco for readings. At one event, for writers including novelist Susan Straight, the crowd included luminaries such as Dave Eggers, A.S. Byatt and Amy Tan. Afterward, Packer joined the group for a bite to eat.

So what about the spin that Packer -- and her stories -- reflects the perspective of young people on the peripheries? How does the literary fame affect her worldview as the outsider looking in?

“That really sort of implies that [the hype] means so much to your world that it’s going to change who you are, and I just don’t think that’s the case,” she says evenly. “I mean, part of just being a thinking human being is having enough sort of skepticism toward the world so it’s not as though I’m really thinking, ‘Oh, I’m in.’ ”

Packer said her life has not changed much since she got the book contract, reportedly for a $250,000-plus advance (she won’t give an exact figure). The money allowed Packer and her husband to buy their house, but it doesn’t mean that the world suddenly is reacting to her as a person of note, she points out. In San Francisco, it’s still hard for her to hail a cab successfully.

“I can still go into a store and have someone think, ‘Oh, is she going to steal something,’ or, if I went into a boutique or something, ‘Will I really spend my time on this person who looks like she’s 20 and probably doesn’t have money?’ So there are all sorts of ways in which it can play out that you’re not taken seriously or whatever. But it’s not like I’m spending my life wringing my hands [over it].”

Growing up, Packer lived in various cities including Chicago, Atlanta and Louisville, her family’s economic status ranging from upper-middle class to “eating mayonnaise sandwiches.” Her father was a liquor store owner whose income varied; her mother took Packer and her sister to the library on the bus every day. In high school, Packer thought she would become a robotics engineer, but later, at Yale University, she hunkered down on literary fiction.

After her book tour ends in a couple of weeks, she’ll get back to work on her first novel, a story about the buffalo soldiers, all-black Army units that helped patrol the West after the Civil War. In the fall, she will teach writing for one semester at her alma mater in Iowa.

Just a couple of more weeks of talking about herself and then she can get back to her life. Media interviews “just sort of give you less time for what you really like to do, which is to write.” She catches herself and laughs. “I say that and, yet, sometimes I have time and I say, ‘I don’t want to write’ ... knowing the first draft is going to be horrible.”