The Banta Award 1988

Suite for Calliope
by Ellen Hunnicutt
St. Martin's Press, 1987

The 1988 Banta Award BOOK

Just before daybreak the old lioness stirs in her bed of sweet clover hay under the low eaves of her wooden stall. Her anguished bellow shakes me awake, rockets over the caved-in giraffe barn, and cannonballs out across the vacant winter meadow. Monumenta! Queen of the veld. Every morning I come back from nameless dreams by way of Africa - foot by cheek, leg by arm, stiff as icicles, nose red - to the blue-brown, ice-patched emptiness of Indiana.
Suite for Calliope (pronounced, as circus people do, to rhyme with "cantalope") opens with its heroine, Ada Cunningham, under the alias, Norma Bellini, living in the winter quarters and museum of a circus (the setting is Indiana but it sounds suspiciously like Baraboo, Wisconsin). Through a series of flashbacks, Ada tells us how she came to be there, and we realize this is a book that can take its rightful place among those other great novels for adults about childhood odysseys, Huckleberry Finn and David Copperfield. All the elements are there: a teenager, wise beyond her years, who runs away from home to escape the sinister clutches of an adult relative; a life on the road filled with adventures and eccentric characters; the getting of wisdom about life and herself; an eventual haven and reunion and mysteries revealed ... and very fine writing.

Although Ada has been handicapped since birth by two crippled fingers on each hand and a lame leg, her musician father, Reynard, and journalist mother, Grace, insist she is a musical prodigy. She does become a competent musician and repairer of violins (her thoughts on music and musicians make for some of the most beautiful writing of this beautifully written book), but she knows early on that she is not a genius. Her acceptance of her handicap and of her parents' weakness for self-deception is among the first of the many lessons she will learn in her odyssey.

Her mother's sudden death forces Ada into the role of protector of her mentally unbalanced father from the consequences of his condition, into being a parent to her parent. She cannot accomplish this for long. He is institutionalized, framed, actually by his wife's sister Edlyn, and Ada finds herself threatened with the same fate by Edlyn, who has some dark secret to keep hidden. Ada runs away. Adopting a variety of identities to avoid detection by the authorities, she supports herself on the road by playing the piano in bars and brothels, and at one point, sharing a house with a self-proclaimed schizophrenic artist and witch named Kyle. Having to endure physical dangers and loneliness teaches her street smarts as well as insight into the power of art to comfort and explain the inevitable pain and losses that life brings. She eventually makes her way to the circus quarters, where damaged but a survivor, she finds a home among the aged performers living there, also damaged each in his or her own way but also survivors.

The book is not the melodrama that this synopsis may suggest. On the frame of its action-filled plot hang lyrical meditations on the nature of life and art. Ada, at once tough and sensitive, resourceful and reflective, is a heroine who earns the reader's admiration and affection. With disciplined writing, the author has managed to pack wisdom, adventure, tragedy, humor, pathos, and a large cast of full-bodied characters into a relatively slim book while keeping the pace measured, almost serene. It is a joy to read and not easily forgotten.

The AUTHOR
Ellen Hunnicutt

"I can't remember a time when I didn't want to write. I remember as a child I was a big movie fan and when I didn't want the movie to end, I would go home and write other endings to make the movie keep going."

Ellen Hunnicutt was born on May 4, 1931, in Portland, Indiana. An accomplished musician from a musical family (her father was a musician and teacher and her grandfather a violin maker), Ms. Hunnicutt began writing in the 1950's while traveling with her engineer husband and raising their three sons. She wrote for a variety of newspapers and magazines. "When I had young children," she recalls, "I wrote for baby magazines. When we lived in a trailer, I wrote for a trailer magazine. Wherever I was, I wrote what I could." She later turned to children's fiction, writing as "E. M. Hunnicutt." Many of these pieces were later anthologized by major textbook publishers.

Ms. Hunnicutt attended Ball State University in Indiana, El Camino Jr. College in California and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she received her bachelor's degree in English and her master's degree in English/creative writing in 1984. She published her first short story in l979, and has since published fiction in a number of magazines, including Cimarron Review, Indiana Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Mississippi Review, Prairie Schooner, and South Dakota Review. In 1986 she was awarded a $5,000 Literary Arts Fellowship for her fiction by the Wisconsin Arts Board. In 1987 her collection of short stories, In the Music Library, won the prestigious Drue Heinz Literature Prize, which carries an award of $7,500 and publication of the book by the University of Pittsburg Press. This collection has also been recognized as an Outstanding work of literature by the Literary Awards Committee. In addition to the Banta Award, Hunnicutt's first novel, Suite for Calliope, also received a first prize in fiction from the Council for Wisconsin Writers.

Ms. Hunnicutt currently lives in Big Bend, Wisconsin, in a fieldstone house built in 1862. She teaches studio piano privately and creative writing at Waukesha County Technical College, UW-Milwaukee, and for UW-Madison Extension.

1988 WLA Literary Awards Committee Members

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