ZZ Packer "Drinking Coffee Elsewhere"

ZZ Packer's website: http://web.mac.com/zzpacker/zzpacker/Home.html

Interviews with ZZ Packer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DG9fQBGD0sc
                                          http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D50EMdmkE6M

Super duper interesting websites :)          http://www.identitytheory.com/zz-packer/
                                          http://www.writersdigest.com/writing-articles/by-writing-goal/improve-my-writing/packer-1
                                          http://www.wordsmitten.com/author_zzpacker.htm

Works by ZZ Packer: Drinking Coffee Elsewhere
                                  New Stories from the South
                                  Buffalo Soldiers

If you're interested in buying her stuff check out Amazon yo! :D



MA PAPER!

Dr. Anderson                                                                                       Shaderika McCarther

Story collection case study : ZZ Packer                                              March 12, 2012

Case Study: “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere”

            One of the things that I enjoyed most about ZZ Packers writing is the closeness that you feel with her main characters. Her stories are written in a first and third person perspective with her psychic distance ranging between three to five and usually sitting around a four. When I was reading this collection of short stories I feel as though I was able to get a strong sense of her characters, how they felt what they were thinking and what to expect next of them. I feel that she accomplishes this through the use of language, even when the story wasn’t written in first person I felt as though I was able to get into the head of the character though their speech, the things that were said by her characters were helpful in getting a good feel on who they were as people and the thoughts they would have and feelings they experienced. I liked her range of psychic distance because it allowed for me to get close to the characters which was helpful in getting to know and understand her characters but I wasn’t sitting at a distance of five the whole time I would be reading, there were plenty of times were she would back off the main character so that you would be able to get a firm grasp pf what was actually going on around them so that you could understand their surroundings and what each character was going through. Out of the eight short stories in this collection all of the protagonist are African American and in all but one of the stories they are females. In her stories the protagonist relatively young and the oldest being a freshman in college but all of them seem to be going through some sort of struggle that ends of giving them a certain perspective on the world. All eight of these stories have several strong similarities the first being the way that they end, all of the stories end leaving you to wonder about the future of the characters, At the end of each of these stories I found myself wondering what exactly happened to the protagonist, the endings were all sort of vague leaving wide ranges of possibilities to what could have happened to them which allows you to use your imagination to give an end to the stories. Another similarity are the themes within these stories all of them deal with racial tensions even though the stories take place at different times and they all show that the world is not a perfect place that there are unjust events that happen in life but that they should be accepted because that is how the world is, no of these stories have a “perfect ending.” Another similarity in several of the short stories in this collection is that they have religious tones to them, they take place at churches, with a religious group, or their religious believes and upbringing plays an important role in their lives. With ZZ Packer’s writing she doesn’t try to get you to believe anything that is out of the ordinary the things that she are writing about are very tangible and are things that you could see happening on everyday life, this is something that I really liked because I felt that it made her stories relatable because I could connect them to real life events. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this collection because when I read usually like for my stories to have definite endings, I like to be able to have closure but after reading a couple of stories I understood the type of endings she was going for and I found that I actually liked what she was doing with her stories.  I really enjoyed this collection of short stories and am glad that I went with ZZ Packer for my case study the fact that I enjoyed reading her stories so much made this assignment more fun than work.