Jeff Alessandrelli and Anna Mantzaris: On Novelistic Citations, Embracing the Limitation of One’s Talent, and Their Books ‘And Yet’ and ‘Occupations’

In Jeff Alessandrelli’s novel And Yet (Future Tense Books, 2024), real-world citations—including those from Susan Sontag, George Orwell, Joan Didion, and Eileen Myles—blend with an artifice-free narrator, one resolute and unpretending. Alessandrelli, who calls poetry his primary genre, knows his way around fiction like the best of prose writers. Extraordinarily adept at making his book’s male protagonist three-dimensional, in And Yet one feels confided in through the stories of near connection, along with anxieties about sex, selfhood, and overall struggles with adulthood. The fictional voice demonstrates the ultimate life examined through engaging and unwavering self-observation with poetic language that was bound to filter through.

Anna Mantzaris’s Occupations (Galileo Press, 2024) is the rare book that is short but easy to get lost in. At just sixty pages, the stories in the text all deal around conceptions of work, hence the title. But how they arrive at the (non) conclusions within is supremely imaginative and engaging—a directive, how-to type of book this is not. “The Taxi Driver” begins, “You know I can’t drive. I was confused by the text. How could I stay at ground control Major You and stop on command and bake torticas and brush my hair and wash the dishes—all at the same time”. Occupations revels in the fabulism of work as both practice and dream, where money and fantasy commingle. (Or don’t.)

We spoke to each other about our composition and revision processes, Studs Terkel, Anna’s day job(s), and how Jeff blurs fact, citation and fiction.

Anna Mantzaris: I love the format of your novel. I’m wondering how it came about. Did you know you would use citations from an early draft? What was the process in terms of creating the structure?

Jeff Alessandrelli: I wrote the bulk of And Yet in 2018 and initially I didn’t know what I was writing. The book focuses on sex and shyness and societal norms and from the get go I knew I was interested in exploring those topics… but I wasn’t at all sure what I had to say about them. One of my favorite writers is David Markson and I love how in his later novels his use of cultural anecdote and artistic “tidbit” adds up to something greater. The novels are essentially commonplace books, albeit with character and plot. I primarily think of myself as a poet and in writing And Yet I thought a lot about building towards something, in a way that I don’t when I write poetry. The way I knew to move forward in the book was to quote other writers and thinkers and musicians. I wanted my book to actively incorporate more than just my own imagination and internal thought processes.

Your book Occupations is completely different than that, though. The short stories in it completely inhabit a certain person’s character and occupational mindset. (“The Accountant,” “The Cleaning Woman,” “The Fortune Teller,” “The Lighthouse Keeper,” “The Tollbooth Collector,” etc.). You revel in the imagination. How did you come up with the professions that you wanted to explore in Occupations and did you give yourself any specific parameters while writing? The narrator in each story definitely seems to subvert occupational expectations, almost from beginning to end.

AM: I wrote “The Accountant” first, after hearing two women talking about eating a potato (which on the page became a piano), and I sent it out. I wanted to explore someone who is always keeping track of food (for herself and others) and bring that internal food-shaming voice out of the dark and onto the page. Then I randomly wrote “The Flight Attendant” and sent it out. Both pieces were printed and I thought maybe I could play around with the flash format. I’d just written two unpublished novels and a lot of unpublished short stories. Using flash, or a short format, felt fun and like something I needed to do in response to a lot of rejected work.

I didn’t initially know that they would all be occupations. I am very disorganized with my electronic files and was looking for something the other day and came across a Word doc in which I listed the first two titles (“The Accountant” and “The Flight Attendant”). I had other titles like “The Neighbors” (everything was originally plural) and at the bottom I made a note that read “All occupations?” I narrowed in after that and I tried some jobs that I just couldn’t make work in the fiction—photographers, police women, and teachers—who remain unemployed on the page. I’ve always loved reading about jobs and as a teenage girl I was obsessed with Studs Terkel’s Working, so focusing on all occupations just kind of fell into place, and I had a lot of fun looking for and playing with the language of work.

I’m curious—how did you come to your novel title and the repetition of “And yet” in the book? As a reader it feels both reassuring and unexpected. It often transitions into a citation and, yes, I am going to write, “and yet” here (!) it stands alone like a line of poetry. It reads as meaningful and multi-functional. 

JA: That’s so kind of you to say that, Anna—thank you. And I mostly think of myself as a poet, so I suppose that fits.

I have to be honest—when I wrote And Yet I was entering uncharted territory for myself as a writer, as I’d never written anything like the book before. Early on, writing the phrase “and yet” in places [throughout the book] forced me to keep writing, as by virtue of those two words something had to come next… Even if at the time I had no idea what it was. Citation probably shows up quite a bit after “and yet” simply because I wrote the book with a stack of books beside me and sometimes even on my lap. So when the “and yet” throat-clearing happened I always had something to say/write by virtue of the texts nearby me. Most of the work that I write is, broadly, associational—I’m not really “I have the best idea for a movie” type of person—so simply quoting from a text near by me didn’t seem like a bad idea… And inevitably what I quoted from I “massaged” into my own thought and vernacular, at least through the prism of the book/my protagonist.

I love how you mentioned Studs Terkel—I know Working and his book Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel about the American Obsession is currently on my coffee table. Interesting that you first encountered him as a teenager… How did that come about and what role do you think he or his work played in your development as a writer? How he constructs his oral biographies has impacted my own conception of narrative, I think. Because it’s all—or mostly—spoken language, his books are so deeply readable. (It’s all an overheard conversation, endlessly enticing.)

AM: My memory of coming across his work for the first time is that I took it out from the local library. I always went to the library with my mother and we’d take out the maximum number of books. My mother reads almost a book a day. And I am so grateful to her that I was exposed to her reading habits early on with her towering stacks of books next to her bed and books strewn all over the house. I remember not wanting to return Working (and this is a bit hazy but I picture that version of Working all in one volume in a thick paperback). I used Working as a Webster’s oracle of sorts—flipping to a page randomly to see what my future profession might be. And I was so compelled by the voices he captured. And it’s funny to think about how even though they are real people, they can read like amazing characters coming off the page. I was recently thinking about this one day and walked over to Market Street to get a coffee with my friend Peter and a man was standing on the sidewalk reading Studs Terkel! It was a hardcover and somehow I didn’t get the title probably because I was happily frenzied and thinking about coincidence while trying to carry on a conversation. I am also a big fan of Barbara Ehrenreich and find a neat intersection of the roles she took on in Nickel and Dimed.

Changing gears, I’ve been obsessively thinking about how lines are printed as “highlighted” in the citations you use in And Yet from Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Towards Self-Realization. The protagonist explains they are passages marked by a previous owner/s (in green, in blue, in margins with red ink). We’re in a used book inside a book! You masterfully create a feeling of realness by weaving a fictional story with findable references, including music/lyrics. It’s a remarkable hybrid form that culminates in making the pages feel three-dimensional. What parameters did you set for yourself when writing the novel? How does it feel for you as a writer to blur truth and fiction?

JA: I’ll answer your last question first. To be honest it felt really weird to blur truth and fiction, especially around such charged subject matter as sex. (And, to a degree, shyness.) When I write poems I always think of them as fictional, and I definitely play around with persona poems, found language, etc. The trope of the lyric poet lyre-ing away while rejoicing or lamenting his or her life’s choices, the loves and heartbreaks and everything in between—that isn’t me. In And Yet’s prologue I quote from a 2010 interview with James Tate and David Berman:

DB: In a 1982 interview, you said, “The I, of course is never autobiographical.” Twenty-eight years later, I ask you: isn’t your poetry at least 5 percent autobiographical?

JT: I’d say 1 percent.

That’s how I feel about my poetry and the same holds true with fiction. But I’ve found that with fiction—especially with this book—it’s harder for people to believe that the “I” isn’t me. Which makes sense, as he very definitely could be. And parts of him, of course, are—although I don’t think of myself as very shy now, growing up I definitely was, both sexually and otherwise. But the protagonist of And Yet is way more needy and neurotic than I am. I think of him as somewhat of a beautiful loser, honestly, if a good-natured one.

I think the only parameter I gave myself when writing And Yet is that I wanted there to be other voices in the text besides my own. Weirdly for a writer maybe, I’m not that interested in myself. And I love when a book—no matter the genre—also deals with outside sources, referents, citations, etc. I was a history minor as an undergrad and I’ve always been interested in the field. 

That you wrote two unpublished novels prior to Occupations seems significant! How did those books evolve and what were the plots of them? Also—when you write, “I tried a bunch of jobs that didn’t work in the fiction—photographers, police women, and teachers—who remain unemployed on the page,” what do you mean exactly? While composing Occupations how were you able to gauge whether a job was going to “work” or not for the purposes of the specific story and the book as a whole? 

AM: The first I titled The Highly Sensitive World of Theo Sweetman and it alternates between two points of view—Theo, who is deeply affected by the world around him, and a woman named Lily, who has lost her dad. It’s essentially a strange love story. I wrote the second novel, a mystery, at the beginning of the pandemic. It takes place at a hotel and I tried to play with alternating points of view, three in that story. One character is a travel writer, and she is based a bit on my former work. I’ve always been a bit obsessed with hotels and that feeling of temporarily living in the “in-between” and the things that can happen in those transient spaces. I also think I immersed myself in the world of a hotel because I really wanted to go somewhere at the time. I have recently been on a lot of planes and rereading it while flying because that somehow feels right so I may get back to it with a revision. 

To the second part, I am not that good at gauging things. I just kind of ran up against a wall in Occupations with certain professions that seemed like they would work but just ended up ​​clichéd, like the teacher, so I let them go. When my writing friends found out I was working on the series they would often throw out ideas and I think that’s how the taxi driver got in there. 

JA: In your author bio in Occupations it states that you teach writing in the MFA program at Bay Path University. How long have you worked there and what does teaching in that specific MFA program entail exactly? Do you solely teach fiction or in other genres as well? And how does teaching impact your own writing—or does it?

AM: Thank you for asking me about this. I have been an adjunct for a long time. I worked full-time in publishing and realized that my creative life was suffering. I’d always been interested in teaching. I was asked to be a guest speaker to talk about publishing and travel writing at Bay Path because I’d written and edited food/travel material for a while. I ended up being offered the course about five years ago and I love teaching it. I don’t think of myself as a writer who teaches. I think of myself as a writer and a teacher. The course has evolved into a class called Writing About Place and I’ve recently started teaching the two-semester Thesis course as well.  

Working with students does affect me. I’m reminded of how important it is for writers to have a sense of community and to get valuable feedback. I work alone a lot and that sense of connection with a class feels really good. Seeing students work on drafts is also a reminder to me of the journey a writer undertakes in revision and how important it is to keep going but also know when to change direction and let some things go.

In addition to your own writing, you are also an editor at Fonograf Editions. How does being an editor affect your writing process in general? Did you have to turn off your internal editor when writing the novel? Is it something that came up for you?

JA: Editing takes up more time now than my own writing, 100%. I work on Fonograf Ed. seven days a week and probably focus on my own writing just one day a week. When I originally drafted And Yet in 2018, though, that wasn’t the case—we were still a literary record label focusing on poetry records (so a niche within a niche) and we only put out one release a year. I edited those releases, but it was audio, and quite different from page-based editing. So in short I didn’t really have any internal editor to turn off when I wrote the book, and through the subsequent revisions of the text my editing work didn’t come into play, or not significantly. That said, I do really love working with our authors at Fonograf Ed. and it feels supremely great to be a part of an organization that showcases such a wide variety of folx, in poetry, prose and hybrid forms. For that I feel lucky.

AM: I’m interested in your decision to use just a first initial for the women in the novel, the idea of anonymity for characters in fiction. Can you talk about that a bit?

JA: Prior to And Yet I’d never written a novel before or even a substantial piece of longer fiction. When I started writing the book my goal was to explore masculinity (or its stereotypical lack) and sex/shyness. The book could have been an essay—and there’s a case to be made that it’s a book-length fictional essay of sorts—but about five pages in I started to… lie. I made things up. There’s an emotional truth to the book, as I said, but the protagonist of the text bears little resemblance to me, beyond some of his hobbies and his geographical wanderings.

Keeping the protagonist unnamed and using just initials for the women that he becomes entangled with seemed to simply go hand-in-hand with my novice approach to fiction writing. The only really fully fleshed out characters in the book are the protagonist’s various therapists. They gain prominence because they have, for the most part at least, practicality as a guiding light, something the protagonist struggles with.

In a similar vein, none of the narrators in Occupations are given first names. They are instead a heaping of “I’s” and a few “You’s.” (The exception to this is the narrator of “The Librarian,” the last story in the book—her name is Chaos.) Did you come to this nameless narratorial pattern due to your emphasis on each character’s occupation rather than specific living, breathing person—or?

AM: In my head, they all have names even though they didn’t make it to the printed page, and with the POV changes I did really rely on the “I’s” and “You’s” but Chaos refused to be left out!

We’re nearing the end and I’m realizing how much I’ve skirted around the subject of your book—sex and shyness—because of my own shyness. I was really blown away when I read your book. I haven’t come across a male protagonist like yours and your fictional exploration of the subject feels quietly bold, in the best way. Did you have reservations writing about sex and societal norms? Now that it’s published (and being reissued by Future Tense), how do you feel when you give readings or when people you know read the book? Has it opened up dialogue? Is that a goal for you as a writer? 

JA: Those are all great—and necessary—questions. I’d be lying if I didn’t say that, for me at least, the book feels dated in certain ways. In 2018 I was a much different person, as was the world. At the time of its composition I was certainly interested in exploring what did seem like a transgressive topic (still does), as sex and masculinity is, societally at least, almost always viewed in a certain reductive prism. The protagonist of And Yet does certainly share predilections with me, but he’s indeed fictional, as are essentially all of the other characters in the book. (Some have real life composites; others don’t.) I think of him as a fairly immature misanthrope, if a well-intentioned one. Which might have been a version of me at one point, but isn’t now.

I try and own the material from the book during readings, prefacing it by discussing the protagonist’s inwardness and interiority. It mostly seems to work. I honestly haven’t had that many people talk to me about the text directly, so I guess we’ll see if that happens moving forward. For me as a writer I’m less interested in opening up dialogue—at least to the wider world—and more interested in surprising myself, whether that’s with a single poem or a whole book. I also think writing And Yet was good for me in that it made clear my limitations as a fiction writer. As I get older I think I’m as interested in what I can’t do as a writer as what I can do… and leaning into both my writerly strengths and weaknesses is something that I want to do more of in the future. Better to acknowledge the scope of one’s talent, writing deeper into what works vs. what doesn’t, as compared to pretending that such a scope doesn’t exist.

I’m curious what your own goals are as a writer, both generally and having now published Occupations. How important is the book as a finalized act or object for you? Do you see yourself writing more stories in the Occupations vein (perhaps delving so finely into cliché that you come out the other side) or is the text (and impulse for it) a done deal at this point? I guess I’m always curious how important one’s daily artistic practice is vs. the finished art “product.” Is Occupations simply one text in a series of texts written by you (whether they get published or not) or does it represent an endstop of sorts? And regardless, what’s coming up next? I really liked the imaginative expansiveness of Occupations, so it was lovely to chat! 

AM: I am so grateful to Barrett Warner and Galileo for publishing Occupations. Other occupations often pop into my head but I think that will be it for them, but who knows. Right now I’m writing a series called Calculations, a short collection of literary math equations. I’ve also written something called the Fraud Papers. It’s a grouping of Freud’s letters and papers in conversation with a fictional narrator. I wanted to play around with citations and looking at how you successfully use citations in your novel is really an inspiration to me.

I’m so happy I saw the Alice Notley book on your table at AWP and we met. And that I was introduced to And Yet. Reading your book means something to me. And it’s just so lovely to be able to talk to you about it. Thank you, Jeff!

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Jeff Alessandrelli is most recently the author of the book And Yet (Future Tense Books, 2024). The Kenyon Review called his 2019 poetry collection Fur Not Light an “example of radical humility…its poems enact a quiet but persistent empathy in the world of creative writing.” Recent work by Alessandrelli appears or is forthcoming in New American Writing, Chicago Review, and Buckmxn Journal. In addition to his writing Jeff also directs the nonprofit book press/record label Fonograf Editions and its imprint BUNNY. You can find more on https://jeffalessandrelli.net/.