WLA Literary Awards Committee

The Banta Award 1997

Sister Sister
by A. Manette Ansay
William Morrow and Company, 1996

The 1997 Banta Award BOOK
Sister, Manette Ansay's remarkable second novel, is a poignant story of one young woman's search for a reconciliation with her past so that she can begin to create her future. Sister is also the story of what takes place in a family when bad things happen but no one is willing or able to talk about them. John Blades of the Chicago Tribune remarks that Ansay has "convincingly caught the shadowy subcurrents of life in small town America."

One common subcurrent of small town life in Ansay's fiction is the influence that traditional religion has on the family. "I don't think one ever leaves the Catholic Church. It is so much a part of the fabric of your character when you have been raised within a family where Catholicism was a part of day-to-day life. It teaches you from an early age to see and think in metaphor," Ansay says. In Sister, she examines the contradiction that within the Catholic faith "there is only one way to achieve transcendence." Another thread permeating her novel is the irony of a male-dominated faith predominately supported by women who are denied access to power within it.

Steeped in the dogma of her rural Wisconsin Roman Catholic childhood, Abigail Schiller, now about to be a mother herself, moves her third person narration back and forth in time as she tries to come to terms with recurring memories of her relationship with her parents and her younger brother Sam, who disappeared at age 17. She reinterprets and reshuffles these painful memories, creating an emotional road map leading up to her brother's disappearance and then away from it. Abby's story focuses on the loss of human relationships and how this separation affects each family member in a different way.

"Abby's father is modeled after the God of my childhood," Ansay admits. The father's rigid beliefs about the proper roles of women and men force him to strive to control his children's behavior and estrange him from his wife and children. Ultimately, his uncompromising beliefs result in the tragic loss of Sam.

Ansay's introspective and compelling novel allows the reader to journey with the narrator as she attempts to get the story of her childhood straight. For many of us, this is a major task of adulthood. As Abby attempts to sort through her childhood memories, we also find ourselves searching to bring our own stories into clearer focus.

The AUTHOR
A. Manette Ansay

A. Manette Ansay, who is now devoting full time to writing, was born in Lapeer, Michigan, in 1964, but spent a great deal of her life growing up in Port Washington, Wisconsin. Manette attended the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, where she planned to have a career as a pianist, until an illness forced her to withdraw. Her undergraduate degree was completed at the University of Main at Orono. She went on to receive her M.F.A. from Cornell University in 1991, and became a lecturer in English there until 1992. Most recently, she taught English at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, where she lives with her husband, Jake Smith.

Ansay has received numerous awards and honors. She had a residency at the MacDowell Colony both in 1991 and 1995; received the Nelson Algren Award for Short Fiction, Chicago Tribune, in 1992, for her short story, "Read This and Tell Me What It Says"; the AWP Short Fiction Prize for her collection of short stories under the same title in 1994, along with WLA's Outstanding Achievement recognition in 1995; a National Endowment for the Arts Grant for fiction in 1993, and a Pushcart Prize for fiction in 1994. In 1995, Manette was given a Bread Loaf Writers Conference fellowship, a Ragdale Foundation residency, and won the Theodore Roethke Prize for Poetry, Poetry Northwest. 1996 brought her the Patterson Prize and, in 1997, the Great Lakes Fiction Prize for her 1995 book of short stories Read This and Tell Me What It Says.

Manette's work has appeared in Best American Stories in 1992 and 1994. She has been a contributor to periodicals including Story, North American Review, Indiana Review, Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry and Prose, and Quarterly West. She has performed readings as part of the Visiting Writers Series at a number of universities and colleges; has been an instructor with Sewanee Younger Writers Conference and the Northshore Younger Writers Conference. Currently, she's associate editor of Willow Springs, 1995-. She published her first novel, Vinegar Hill, in 1994. Since then, she has written a second novel, Sister, winner of this year's Banta Award and is currently working on a third novel, River Angel, to be published in 1998.

1997 WLA Literary Awards Committee Members

WLA Literary Awards Commitee