| Maria reva |
BOOKS OF THE YEAR
MARIA REVA
BY LARA PRESCOTT
March 4, 2020
In 2015, when the twelve incoming graduate students at the Michener Center for Writers sent around emails introducing ourselves, one person caught my eye: Maria Reva. Maria had written that she lived in Vancouver—having immigrated there from Ukraine when she was seven—and was currently working construction to support her writing. “I work with some nasty chemicals and lead paint,” she wrote, “but get to wear a space suit (kind of).”
This first glimpse into Maria’s weird and wonderful mind was the perfect introduction to her fiction: stories that have made me laugh out loud, tear up, find shards of hope in the least likely of places, and Google facts like if “bone music” really exists.
It does. I first read Maria’s story “Bone Music” in Elizabeth McCracken’s fiction workshop a few months after our email introductions. Reading this equally hilarious and heartbreaking story about an agoraphobic woman named Smena who hasn’t left her apartment in years but runs a successful underground business selling illegal vinyl records copied onto medical X-rays, broke me in two.