“It’s difficult, sometimes, to describe the process of writing a story,’’ said ZZ Packer. “Stuff comes to you as you’re writing, you’re kind of carried away on a tide of what you’re fascinated by.’’

Packer’s short story “Brownies,’’ first published in Harper’s Magazine, then included in her debut collection, “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere’’ (2003), is the first selection of a pilot program in which the entire graduate writing community at Lesley University will read and discuss the same story.

The impetus for “Brownies,’’ said Packer, came as she was “thinking back to childhood, and how girls are, and how they treat each other,’’ as well as how the adult world works; race and segregation, class differences, and bullying are all at play as two groups of girls, one black and one white, encounter one another at a Girl Scout camp.

Although Packer was a Brownie, then a Girl Scout, and grew up partly in Atlanta, where the story is set, it’s important not to assume the story is purely autobiographical. “You have to make some stuff up!’’ she said. “I feel as though writing a story, at least the drafting, you have to go to those places, or that age or whatever, to be able to do it. It’s not a fully analytical part of my brain that’s doing that. The analytical part comes in revision, when I’m looking at word choice, dialogue, structure. . . . But that tends to come later.’’

These days Packer is working on a novel set during Reconstruction. The scope and cast of characters are bigger than her previous work, but Packer said it also explores “issues of race, gender, and ethnicity — you can’t really escape them in America. How we’ve gotten to this place of rabid gun culture, vigilantism, intense libertarianism that’s so rooted in what we think of as being the American type or breed. Those are the kind of things worth writing about, things that make people think and think again. The topics that people want to bury.’’

Packer will speak and read at 6:30 p.m. on Saturday at Lesley University’s Marran Theater, 34 Mellen St., Cambridge.

Kate Tuttle, a writer and editor, can be reached at kate.tuttle@gmail.com.