Anna Mantzaris recently released her first book, Occupations (Galileo Press), a trim collection of stories whose strange charm defies narrative logic. Around each story’s surreal comic streak runs a manic filigree. What feels like playful eccentricity and whimsy on first read, gradually becomes unnerving as things progress. Mantzaris’s first-person narrators appear so composed and clear-spoken, so manicured, that we lean in closer to hear them out and watch them come unhinged. Something about them fills me with wonder and dread.

Mantzaris is a diligent, hardworking writer and teacher who plies multiple genres and is already busy on her next project. She lives in San Francisco and is a supportive artistic friend to many Bay Area writers, including myself. We conducted the following interview via e-mail.

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JOSH PERALTA:  I suppose it’s a bad habit of mine as a reader to hunt for clues about the mind of the author in the pages of their books. But I wonder what to make of the characters and narrators in Occupations, all of whom have a bizarre opaqueness that fascinates and frightens me. Most of the voices are anonymous, all our women and feel a bit unhinged. The further I read, the more I wanted to know them, but the more I felt they resisted being known. And yet the current of dry humor throughout the book made my experience of this tension oddly pleasurable. So I am genuinely curious to know: In these pieces are you writing purely imaginatively? Or have you tucked within these speakers something more personal? Are they packed with your secret manias and private fantasies? Or are they merely the product of whim? I’m eager to understand what set these voices and pieces in motion for you.

ANNA MANTZARIS: I’m also a truth hunter in fiction, looking for clues and parallels in stories with an author’s life. One thing I like to talk about when I teach literature is how much should we know, and how much does it matter what we know about an author as we read their work. Occupations is fiction. That said, the truth in my fiction comes from the feelings and emotions I have when writing. I’m always trying to capture how I feel or how I have felt and translate that into my characters and work.

JP: Something else that occurred to me pretty early on as I read your book is that your characters’ supposed “occupations” rarely seemed connected to any literal job they worked. Ultimately I came to think of each character as more related to a preoccupation or set of obsessions which I felt were being slyly hinted at in their supposed job or chapter title.

Take for instance, “The Flight Attendant,” one of my favorites. This story deals with “flight” and “attending,” but not in the way that the title seems to suggest. It begins with a housewife whose “purse is a hot air balloon of snacks,” watching children on a playground from afar, her “feet firmly planted” as if she is her own human ballast or anchor point. In literal terms, she’s the only one in her family (including the dog) who doesn’t fly first class. And yet she is crucially involved in the family’s travel planning—packing and dropping off her kids at the train station for camp or college and delivering her husband to the airport for business trips. By the end, this supposed “flight attendant” sits alone on a shabby bus station bench, waiting to depart for points unknown, speaking to herself in a way that feels unhinged: “No one will ever look for you in such a place. Soon you will take off, seated next to someone who found a hatchet in the riverbed.”

This is such an ominous and unexpected ending–I loved it! And there’s so many similar and surprisingly dark moments like it in the other stories. This quality in your writing reminds me of Shirley Jackson’s stories. Are there any writers or real-life experiences or incidents that served as inspiration or starting points for these stories?

AM: I wrote a couple as one-off pieces and then they, without a lot of effort, coalesced into a collection of job-titled stories. The heavy lifting of the writing process came later with a lot of revision. Having the structure of an occupation (or as you say “preoccupation”!) gave me a lot of freedom to go different places on the page. Often, I need a safety net as a writer, a form in which to place my ideas so I don’t battle with a blank page. I may be behind the curve but I just learned of the term “hermit crab” in writing when I was at AWP this spring. I didn’t realize that much of what I’d been doing was telling things in forms that were “shells,” using a form that was already established in which to put my work. At the same time I wrote these job “descriptions,” I was writing a series of stories in job application form, and for many years I’ve been playing around with fiction that utilizes a previous written form/structure.

The inspiration when I wrote Occupations was overflowing. I was going through big changes in my life, and I had so many emotions to put on the page that using multiple “jobs” and female characters allowed me to work with them and delve into themes I wanted to explore. I’ve always been interested in the subject matter and theme of infidelity. Even when I was a teenage girl I was writing stories about cracking marriages and betrayal! For me, the fasciation is not the literal cheating in a relationship, but the haunting darkness that surrounds the untruths we often tell one another, even in the most sacred of friendships and relationships, as well as the untruths we tell ourselves, and it’s that darkness in authors, like Shirley Jackson, that I’m very much drawn to.

JP: Who or what were you reading as a teenager? Do you still feel their influence on you or your writing?

AM: I would read anything and everything. Similar to now. I was always obsessed with reading product packaging, junk mail, and magazine ads. I still get a lot of inspiration from those things now although spam e-mail is not as good as the paper mail and I miss the days when I did mail art with writer friends. When I was growing up we went to the library all the time and I’d take out the maximum number of books and along with typical teenage book series I read Philip Roth and Milan Kundera and Anne Sexton. I alternated these with cereal box ad copy and strange things I collected and, embarrassingly, was more into the idea of reading those authors than actually reading them because I was a teenage girl who wanted to be a writer.

I don’t know how much I’m influenced by other writers (I avoid reading about similar subjects to what I am currently writing about) but I am very inspired by writers all the time. Right now I am kind of losing my mind over short stories by Yun Ko-eun and Rivka Galchen and I am always rereading Virginia Woolf because I use her work in my classes and there is always more to discover in her pages and more to try and understand.

JP: The cover design for Occupations isexcellent and truly eye-catching! The woman on the cover is beautiful and there is a bygone feel in her dress as well as in the office space she inhabits. But I happen to know this woman’s also your mother. Can you share a little about the origin of the photo and how you chose it for your cover? I’m curious to know what your mother’s reaction was when she first saw the book?

AM: I’ve always loved that photo and I thought of it as soon as I started talking about the cover with Barrett Warner, the Editor at Galileo. He said yes immediately and I didn’t tell my mom until I had a printed copy of the book. She was surprised and quite happy. It was at her first job in New York and she said she saved the buttons from that dress because it was her favorite.

JP: Many of these stories don’t follow a traditional narrative arc. Readers are thrown into the voice of these characters, which often feels like a secret interior voice that isn’t always concerned with explaining or clarifying things explicitly. Sometimes they read like poetic maunderings of madwomen in which a mood may dominate and much must be inferred by the reader. What advice can you offer readers to prepare them for this challenging aspect of Occupations? 

AM: Although I would categorize them as prose, flash fiction in particular, I can see how they may not be expected, particularly with how they are titled. When I shared some of these in early drafts with other writers there was some debate about their form: Were they strictly prose? Were they veering into poetry? Were they a hybrid? I would love to say “expect the unexpected” but that sounds like an oversell! One fun thing post-writing has been that working in a shorter form has led me to taking some prose ideas and writing them as poetry.

JP: That’s not surprising at all. It seems poetry is having a bit of a vogue these days, which is really great. And yet I find I’m regularly surprised to learn as many people still read and write it. I love it, myself, as you know.

Anyway, I’m not sure if you’re familiar with Studs Terkel’s 1972 book Working, but it collects lots of real-life interviews with people talking about the work they do for a living. Grocery store cashiers and box boys, taxi drivers, teachers and stockbrokers all discussing openly and sincerely about their line of work, especially aspects they dislike. You don’t get the sense these people are putting up a front to glorify themselves, their line of work, or their industry. Nevertheless, there’s a respectability in their candor. Anyway, I couldn’t help but think of Working while reading your book. For one, there’s an obvious similarity in your books’ titles and you both introduce your subjects or “characters” by their job descriptions. But I happen to know you’re also currently working on a project involving a series of applications for improbable jobs. What’s up with all the work-related material? How did you conceive these projects—as themed collections from the start or did they develop more organically?

AM: I adore Studs Terkel, particularly Working. I love how he gave voices to people through their jobs. I first came across Working when I was a teenager, one of my many library books. I don’t outline or come up with a theme in advance, it’s usually something that emerges and then I use a form I stumble on–like job descriptions or applications—to keep going and “place” what I want to write about.

I’ve always been interested in the language of jobs, even though I’ve always felt like I don’t fit into the workforce in a “normal” way. My first job out of college was for a big book publisher in New York, and it seemed like the ideal fit, and for years after I worked full-time in publishing and I had some really interesting jobs but I always felt like an outsider, an observer watching and trying to adapt to the schedule, the language and environment but even so I found it fascinating even when suffering through office birthday parties.

JP: I’m pleased to know you’re a fan of Studs. But the words working, occupations, applications: these things can really stress people out. Do you have any entertaining anecdotes from your years of work experience over the years that you care to share that might lighten the mood and lower readers blood pressure?

AM: I had some gaps in my employment and I remember going to a temp agency in New York and they asked me my interests/hobbies and I said poetry and the man interviewing me couldn’t stop laughing and called out to his co-workers, “Do we have any jobs for poets?” I’m sure you can guess the answer was no.

JP: That’s funny, and a little painful. But how are you doing with your work-life-balance as a writer and a teacher lately? Have you gleaned any insights to share with those of us also trying to ride this line?

AM: I love teaching. I learn so much from the students, where they get their inspiration from and seeing them go through the writing process is helpful to me and a reminder of the work you need to do on the page to get to a final draft. Working as an educator has also allowed me to have a creative life. I’m probably the worst person to ask about work-life balance as I don’t really distinguish working hours and writing hours and teaching hours. It’s all kind of a big and wonderful jumbled blur and I like it that way.

JP: I have to ask: what about a dream job? Like, if you could receive a living wage to do whatever you chose for 40 hours a week, what would you do?

AM: Aside from what I am doing now, my dream job is to be a baker. The only problem is I am a total night person.

JP: I think bakers are traditionally night people too, or at least very early morning people. This could be a good plan B for you. Would you bake some cookies for me?

AM: That’s true. Or I could just stay up and roll in. I find it interesting how many writers I love who have had a big culinary life (like Joan Didion). But it makes sense because being in the kitchen and physically making things is often the perfect antidote to writing. And your characters have to eat. As do your friends and fellow writers so I am always up for baking cookies.

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Anna Mantzaris is a San Francisco-based writer. Her work has appeared in Ambit, The Cortland Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Necessary Fiction, New World Writing Quarterly, Sonora Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of Occupations (Galileo Press). She teaches writing in the M.F.A. program at Bay Path University.

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Joshua Peralta is a teacher and writer based in Oakland, California. His stories, essays, and poetry have appeared in Open Letters, Bird’s Thumb, Spry, and The Good Men Project. His first book is the novella 3rd & Orange (2022). His next will be the illustrated collection of poetry titled Gross Americana,due in late 2024. For more info, visit joshuaperalta.net.