Ansay Dances Toward Stardom
A. Manette Ansay turned to writing when a rare muscular disorder demanded that she find a new occupation. No dancing, at least in the obvious definition, lay in her future. But Ansay does dance, quite well, in her own way. She has achieved a remarkable amount of recognition over the past decade since learning of her diagnosis. "On January 1, 1988, I started writing because I had to find something I could do sitting down," she said during a recent interview.
Ansay, 33, now lives in Nashville with her husband, Jake Smith, a web developer.
"From the beginning I worked for two hours, three times a week," she said. "I began with poetry, which I felt I could do, and it was interesting and didn't require a lot of physical activity. I lived in Maine at the time and heard about a writer's conference, called Stone Coast. A woman secretly paid my tuition, although I was told that I had received a scholarship. There weren't any. Actually, she worked overtime at J.C. Penney's to get the money. Now I teach at Stone Coast in the summers."
Ansay admits she had never been much of a reader and certainly never previously entertained thoughts of writing as a vocation. But during that important first writer's conference, she read aloud the first story she'd ever written.
"Afterwards, this man approached me and introduced himself as Madison Smartt Bell. I had never heard of him, had no clue about who he was. But he gave me his card and said that if I ever needed help, to call him." Bell is one of the leading fiction writers in America, his reputation soaring because of a steady string of successful and critically praised books. "And I didn't even know who he was," Ansay said with a chuckle.
She was born in a small Michigan town about 40 miles from Detroit. The "A" in her name stands for Ann. Born into a Roman Catholic family, she said her mother wanted to pay tribute to Mary the mother of Jesus. "The Ann comes from Mary's mother," she explained. "My mom didn't particularly like the name Mary, so she went to the baby names book and chose Manette, which was defined as another word for Mary. Later she found out that it meant 'handcuff.'"
Ansay doesn't like to talk about her muscle disorder "out of context," she explained. "I developed health problems in my early 20s, but when people find out about it, they focus on my disability and then I become a 'crippled writer.'"
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