"Still Life With Plums"

By Marie Manilla

Vandalia Press

185 pages (paperback). $16.95

"I wish I could say that I have always been a writer, keeping journals and diaries, but that's not the case," Manilla says.

 A Huntington native, she grew up in the city's Beverly Hills neighborhood and like her young friends spent lots of time at two neighborhood landmarks long since gone: Neirman's Pharmacy and the Beverly Theatre. Like her father, she attended St. Joseph Catholic School. "In fact, we had the same science teacher -- 35 years apart," she recalls.

 Graduating from high school, she went off to West Virginia University, where she earned a bachelor of fine arts degree in graphic design. Then, like so many West Virginia young people, she left the state to find work. She spent seven years in Houston, Texas, and there "became a reading machine," devouring stacks of books and developing a special taste for short stories. "I love the adrenaline burst of a good piece of short fiction," she says.

Then it happened.

"I vividly remember the Saturday when I finished reading a story in a magazine and, for some reason, I was compelled to write one of my own," she says. "That's all it took to send me down a completely different career path."

And what a path it's been. Since that fateful Saturday, Manilla has written story after story. Since 1996, many of those stories have found their way into the pages of Prairie Schooner, Mississippi Review and other highly respected journals. Now, Vandalia Press, an imprint of West Virginia University Press, has collected 10 of her stories in a new paperback collection, "Still Life with Plums."

No two stories in the collection are alike. In them, you meet -- among other offbeat characters -- a tutor who can only be described as truly evil, a wisecracking dog groomer and an ambulance driver whose mind has been tragically deranged.

All of us sometimes muse on what might be called "the road not taken." In "The Wife You Wanted," a successful career woman home for a visit summons up the courage to attend the funeral viewing of her former boyfriend. She was a sheltered Catholic schoolgirl. He was a roughneck "grease monkey," with permanent grime encrusted under his nails. As a couple, the odds were all against them. Still, now that he's dead, she can't help but think of what might have been.

(Huntington readers of "The Wife You Wanted" will nod knowingly when they encounter references to the former Dwight's Drive-In on 8th Street to driving really, really fast on winding Spring Valley Drive and to a hot-dog stand that's a dead-ringer for Stewart's.)

Some of Manilla's characters are West Virginians, some Texans and still others, somewhat surprisingly, are Latino.

"There is a Latino strand that runs through a few of the stories and though this might at first seem a disconnected thread, it is not," says Manilla. "I fell in love with the food, music and literature of the Latino culture while in Houston."

She also notes that the stereotyping often suffered by Latinos is more than a little similar to that accorded West Virginians who are often scorned as hillbillies. "Thus, I was drawn to tell their stories, which are ultimately all of our stories."

Manilla says that while she made some life-long friends in Texas, "it never felt like home to me. I dearly missed the four seasons, the topography and my family. I moved back to Huntington and pursued an MA in English at Marshall University. After a two-year stint at the Iowa Writers' Workshop for an MFA in fiction I returned to West Virginia where I have been fortunate to be able to teach off and on in the English Department at Marshall."

 It's not hard to see how Manilla's return to West Virginia helped shape her forthcoming novel, "Shrapnel." In it, a 77-year-old right-wing widower and WWII veteran from Texas reluctantly moves in with his feminist, anti-war daughter in West Virginia. Here, he is forced to bury painful family secrets and stifle his tendencies toward racism, classism and homophobia. The novel's publisher, River City Publishing of Montgomery, Ala., describes it as "at turns funny and at other turns frightening -- and frighteningly honest."

That description applies equally well to "Still Life with Plums."

 Manilla and poet Chris Green are scheduled to do a free reading at 8 p.m. Dec. 2 at the Marshall University Memorial Student Center in Huntington. She will be signing books from 1 to 3 p.m. Dec. 18 at Taylor Books in Charleston.

James E. Casto, a retired Huntington newspaperman, frequently reviews books for the Sunday Gazette-Mail.