Nancy Packer

WHY BEING BRILLIANT ISN’T ENOUGH
Nancy Packer’s Lesson Plan

By Michael Cunningham
Photographs by Marcos Lujan

rilliant is not enough,” says Nancy Packer, author, professor emeritus of English and former director of the Stanford creative writing program. “You’ve got to have something else. You’ve got to have a moral center out of which the art radiates.”

We are sitting in the living room of her home on the edge of the Stanford campus, and as she speaks I anticipate the moment, later that evening, when I will repeat her words to my two best friends. My friends and I met over 20 years ago in Packer’s legendary course on the development of the short story, and ever since then, sometimes out of nowhere, one of us will straighten up, go steely-eyed and deliver a Packer-ism. It might be, “Chekhov said the writer must never show his fingers and toes in a story.” It might be, “There are four things you need to know about Flannery O’Connor.

She was a Southerner, she was a Catholic, she was a cripple, and she raised peacocks.”

Over the years we have developed a pretty fair imitation of Packer’s voice, but now, seated in her living room, I am reminded of how pale our version is compared to the original, an Alabama accent solid and steady as an axe cutting into heartwood.

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