As a GTA at the West Virginia University Press, I had the privilege of proofreading Marie Manilla’s short story collection, Still Life With Plums. This hit the bookstores on October 1st, and her first novel Shrapnel is forthcoming from River City Publishing. Marie Manilla will be in Morgantown on October 29th, when she will conduct a reading for the MFA students at 1:00 p.m. and a community reading at Arts Monongahela at 6:30 p.m.

In Still Life with Plums, Marie Manilla portrays diverse characters and their unique experiences. She writes from the perspectives of a psychologically imbalanced former ambulance driver, a Guatemalan widow, an about-to-be-divorced man, a humorous dog-groomer, and a Japanese Latino American poster child. In this way, her writing continually experiments—with character, if not usually with form. She also writes precise and graceful sentences. I teach my 418 mentees that the most beautiful and effective sentences are often short. “Red and purple swelled around gaze and tape,” Manilla writes in “Counting Backwards.” “I saw my squat-kitchened, chain-linked future unfurl in your eyes,” she writes in “The Wife You Wanted.” “A truck rattled down their street, shaking windows, vibrating the [Christmas] tree,” she writes in my favorite story, “Get Ready,” in which a young girl becomes the victim of her mother’s vagrant and thieving lifestyle. My mentees, as well as we MFAers, would do well to study Marie Manilla’s expertly-crafted sentences and the way in which she strings those sentences together into cohesive paragraphs.

I’ve shared a few of my favorite sentences and stories with you; now go buy a book—either from the WVU Press, from your local bookstore, or from Marie when she’s in town—and share with me some of your own favorites. If you haven’t met me, I’m a second-year fiction MFA student—tall, blond and currently limping. See you around!

-Rachel King