Anna Mantzaris, a writer and editor with a breadth of experience, is well-versed in fiction, nonfiction, food writing, and travel writing. Occupations (Galileo Press, 2024), her debut short story collection, tells the stories of sixteen different women, with titles like “The Fortune Teller” and “The Tollbooth Collector.” Mantzaris finds beauty and strangeness in the world, and Occupations is a reflection of her worldview. The book is dedicated to Anna’s mother and sister. The cover art is a photo of her mother, holding eyeglasses and a cigarette, taken at her very first job in New York. This could be a portrait from Mantzaris’s fiction: a woman with a story, looking at something just out of view.
I spoke to Mantzaris over Zoom—me in my apartment in the West Village in New York, she in her San Francisco home. Mantzaris lamented that we couldn’t be in person, immediately exhibiting her warmth, apparent in how she notices the little things. We discussed her fiction and real life, both filled with a striking sincerity. We talked about working on the sentence-level, what the “in-between” really means, and how she handled a polite rejection from Galileo, the publisher who eventually accepted this project.
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The Rumpus: The form of this book is so interesting and unexpected. What was the genesis of it?
Anna Mantzaris: I wrote the first piece in the book, “The Accountant,” as a one-off piece. I was interested in food-shaming and how that happens in our culture. I had read an article that said if two women go to lunch and one woman orders a salad, it’s much more likely that the other woman will order a salad too. There’s an idea of watching and calculating. I wrote it as a flash fiction piece. A little while later, I wrote “The Flight Attendant” as its own thing. After that, I created a list—which I just found the other day—of job titles and different types of roles. They weren’t all job titles. One was called “The Neighbors.” At the end, I put a note that said, “all occupations?” Once I did that, I started to think about using job titles to tell stories I wanted to tell. I’ve always been obsessed with Studs Terkel and the book Working. I’m very interested in jobs and the language of jobs and careers. At the same time I was writing this, I started writing a book called Applications. It’s fiction, in application form. One of them is “Application to eat the sweetest peach in the world.” It’s all about these really bizarre jobs that people would apply for. I was toggling back and forth between that project and this project. Once I got into the job titles, people would throw out ideas for me. I actually tried a bunch that didn’t end up working, but I felt like I had enough to keep going to make it cohesive.
Rumpus: What were some of the job titles that didn’t end up in the book?
Mantzaris: One that I really wanted to write was “The Teacher,” especially because I am a teacher. I wanted to write “The Photographer,” but the language felt so cliched and it felt too obvious. I still think of some that I wish I had written. I wish I had written “The Astronomer,” or “The Weather Person.” I have a lot of other ideas.
Rumpus: What was it like organizing the stories within the book? How did you decide on its structure?
Mantzaris: It’s so funny because when I look at them, I view them in two batches. I wrote them at a very strange time in my life. I was leaving the home that I had lived in for fifteen years and leaving a relationship with a man I had known for twenty years. I told myself to embrace the strangeness of that time. Everything is so impermanent, so I was very interested in capturing all of those feelings that I had at that time and putting them on the page. When I look at these, the first half of the book is the early ones that I wrote. “The Librarian” is the last one that I wrote. It’s so funny we didn’t work very much on the order, it just kind of solidified in its own way. I was talking to Barrett Warner, who is the editor at Galileo [the publisher], and he’s amazing. He had said we’d talk about the order, but we never really had to. It just kind of came together in its own order.
Rumpus: Is there any specific art that you feel your book is in conversation with?
Mantzaris: One thing I kept thinking about, when I was writing this, is that I’m a very nostalgic person—almost overly so. I love ephemera and collecting things. I kept thinking about, not so much specific pieces of art, but capturing that feeling of ephemera on the page. I love things that are vintage and antique, and I have a lot of objects here. I have a painted box [in which] I keep little scraps of paper with text that I find on the ground. I have these words and phrases in this box on the mantel, and that was something that I used in “The Poet/The Lover” piece. She has a box and keeps the words in it. An object like this is something that I used.
Rumpus: “The Poet/The Lover” is the only story in the book with two titles. Was that intentional?
Mantzaris: The editor proposed that title, actually. I was really happy he gave me that because I do think of a poet as the most amazing occupation. The idea of being an explorer and being an observer and being a lover out in the world was something that I wanted to try to capture.
Rumpus: You’ve mastered the one sentence story. You write: “I forgive my first boyfriend for thinking we could be grownups in a faltering log cabin with a straw bed and no roof and all these repercussions.” How do you work, on a sentence level, to come up with something like that?
Mantzaris: One thing that’s been really fun in this project is being able to work on a sentence level and a micro level. I was writing much longer pieces prior to this. I wrote two unpublished novels and I’ve written a lot of long short stories. To be able to work in more of a flash fiction form—a lot of stories under a thousand words—gave me a chance to look at them in a micro way and play with language. Even being able to read them over and over again and hear them aloud—which is not something you can do when you’re drafting out a novel and revising scenes—I was grateful that I could spend the time looking at language really carefully.
Rumpus: You change point of view from story to story. How can you tell which point of view feels right for the character?
Mantzaris: I can’t tell, so I’m really glad that Barrett [Warner, the book editor] could tell. I’m so grateful to him, because I sent him this manuscript and he initially said, “No, thanks,” but he did it in the kindest way. He left a little crack in the door for me: he said, “I think these are close.” I called my friend and read him the note. My friend said, “You should ask him if he’ll work with you.” That’s really not something I would normally do. It’s not in my personality to do that if someone says no, but I did ask him. He immediately said yes. I was very grateful to him because one of the things that he really helped me with was the point of view. He suggested that we change a lot of the stories to first person or second person. Originally, they were in third person. The original version of “The Accountant” is actually two accountants, talking back and forth to each other, not one accountant with an interior voice. Barrett Warner really helped guide me toward the point of view because I didn’t know.
Rumpus: I really appreciated the humor in this book. I loved the phrasing, like, “lime soaked kerosene” or “my typewriter that was given to me by a poet before he asked for it back and I smothered him with trays of marzipan.” You’re an author that trusts their readers and doesn’t over-explain humor. How can you tell when a joke is working in a piece?
Mantzaris: I don’t think I’m funny when I’m writing. I can’t try to be funny, it’s a total fail. So sometimes it’s surprising to me when I’ll write something, and someone will find humor in it. Any time I’ve intended to do it, it doesn’t work. It’s very artificial. It doesn’t hold up. It’s embarrassing. It’s interesting to me when people find humor in something and I’m glad. Even if you’re writing about things like grief or loss, it’s nice to have some cracks of light in there. I’m happy when I read authors and there is humor in there even in the darker times.
Rumpus: How do you navigate the balance between moments of darkness and grief with sparks of humor and moments of lightness?
Mantzaris: I’m a very holistic writer and also a very sensitive person. Even in my own life, I do a lot of things based on emotion. That’s how I write, as well. I’m very aware of capturing things in the moment. Even today, I ran out to get coffee before our interview and there is this amazing storm coming. This is the only time that storm will be coming, and I’ll be meeting with you. Whenever I’m writing, I don’t think I’m consciously trying to balance anything. I’m trying to capture a feeling.
Rumpus: You don’t use narrative in the traditional sense, and I’m impressed with how true to life the stories are. How does each story take shape?
Mantzaris: I go back to trying to capture this feeling of strangeness I had when I wrote these. I was looking at “The Tollbooth Collector,” and the first line is: “I live in the in between.” I wrote these when I was really living in the “in between.” I’m very grateful for that timeperiod because it’s almost like going on a trip or being a traveler. You really see things, especially when you go somewhere for the first time. As a writer, it’s so important to be an observer. When we have these periods in our life of upheaval or transition, we’re a little like travelers in our own lives. We can see things very clearly. For each of these—and they’re very much fiction—I was trying to capture the emotion myself that I had for these women I was portraying.
Rumpus: Did you always know you would have stories all about women?
Mantzaris: I never outlined or really planned anything besides that strange list that I had. I never planned anything. It’s my mom on the cover at her first job in New York, and the giant machine on the right is the calculator. I have the most amazing group of women in my life, and I was thinking of the many different roles that they play. It just organically became about women. Obviously, it’s applicable to everyone. We’re all sort of straddling different roles. I’m not on social media, but I have looked at writers on Instagram and I am always really fascinated by the titles that they give themselves. Writer, mother, cosmic investigator. I’m so interested in these job titles that people give themselves. So much so for women, I have a lot of friends who are women writers, and they have children and they’re teachers or they have full time jobs. I was thinking about Goldie Goldbloom, a flash fiction writer, who has eight children and is a single mother. It’s always amazing to me all of the roles that women take on and how these roles change and evolve. When women are in partnerships—being a wife or a girlfriend of a partner—we take on all these different roles but they’re always changing. Our jobs are always changing and evolving.
Rumpus: How do you decide when and how someone is named in a story?
Mantzaris: A lot of that happened in the editing process. I think I’m overly specific when I’m writing. I put too much on the page. It was really great to work with an editor who asked what we can let go of and how it could be stronger with less. In my head I had named all of these women, but Chaos was the only one that made it onto the page. A lot of times I look at words and I think they’re something else. I’ve always loved the name Chloe, but I’ve always seen it as “Chaos” when I look at it.
Rumpus: Do you want to share any of the names that didn’t make it into the book?
Mantzaris: A lot of them are named after real people that I know. I can’t even tell you about this amazing, powerful group of women who helped me establish a new chapter in my life. I was thinking very specifically about them. I did dedicate the book to Pauline and Christina, and that’s my mom and my sister.
Rumpus: Do you think the way you see the world is reflected in the way you’ve written fiction in Occupations?
Mantzaris: It definitely is fiction, but I would say yes. For good and bad. My lens is very hazy and rose-colored sometimes. I hoped to try to capture that on the page in this way that I look at the world—in a very nonlinear way. I really wanted to play with time in this book. I was interested in some flash forwards, like in “The Cleaning Lady,” she will go to the bus station later. The line is “you will take the bus later.” There’s obviously so much in here about the past but I was really interested in the past, present and future.
Rumpus: What does the physical writing process look like for you? Do you have a computer or a notebook? Do you have a routine or is every day different?
Mantzaris: I’m so interested in writers’ routines and writers’ spaces. I’m kind of obsessed with them. I don’t know if you’ve been to the Emily Dickinson Museum in Massachusetts, but you can actually rent the room where Emily wrote. When I went to Cuba, I visited Ernest Hemingway’s house and was mesmerized by his desk. I couldn’t stop staring at it. I’m very interested in how writers write. I don’t have a routine. I write as much as I can and whenever I can. I’m not someone who thrives on structure or routine. I write primarily on my computer, but I have a lot of random Post-it notes that I’ve written when I’m out. My handwriting is so bad that most of the time I cannot read what I’ve jotted down. I can’t decipher it, so it often becomes something else.
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Author photograph courtesy of Anna Mantzaris
