"You know you always think about audience. I grew up in a small Midwestern community in Wisconsin. Education is not a given there. People live quiet and traditional lives. Lots of people don’t finish high school. College is not something they necessarily do. My thinking and my sense of audience was very much shaped by these people. Then I got into academia and traveled to big cities. I realized how different people live and how different people think, how unaware they are of anything outside of what they’re looking at at that moment. I always thought of small town people as being kind of provincial, but I think that provinciality occurs no matter where we are."

A. Manette Ansay received her MFA from Cornell in 1991. She is the author of three novels, Vinegar Hill (Viking 1994), Sister (William Morrow, 1996), and the upcoming River Angel (William Morrow, April of 1998). Her collection of stories, Read This and Tell Me What It Says, won the 1994 AWP Short Fiction Prize and was published by the University of Massachusetts Press. She is the 1992 winner of the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Prize and a 1993 recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant; other awards include a 1995 Friends of American Writers Prize, the 1996 Paterson Prize, and the 1997 Great Lakes Fiction Prize. Her stories and poems have appeared in many publications including The North American Review, Story, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology. She teaches fiction in Warren Wilson’s MFA program.

The interview was conducted in Manette’s office at Vanderbilt University in April of 1997, when she still taught there.

Camille Renshaw: Joyce Carol Thomas once told me that to write you have to love words. You must be passionate about words.

A. Manette Ansay: Yes, you must love words, and you have to love the story.

CR: How do you shape your story and get to know your characters? What process do you use?

MA: I’ve been reading about Flannery O’Conner’s method. She said, "I write to discover what I know." I learn about my characters by writing about them. Most of what I write doesn’t actually appear on the finished page. It’s both organic and very left-brained, critical. I work from an impulse, but then I take out a part and ask, "What’s happening rhythmically?" "What’s happening in terms of imagery and diction?" "Is there any symbolic potential in this image?" And then I move to the next sentence. Sometimes I get a rush and write two or three pages, but then I go back into it and figure out what each sentence means and why it might be there. If it’s just there gratuitously, it has to come out. Through that process I get to know my characters and what they’re about. Once I get three or four or five, or twenty things consistent about them, the choices that they make after that are easier to discern because they are better motivated. You know a little bit about this person, so you know how they’re probably going to react. And if something appears on the page which contradicts that, you have to think, well, is this a mistake? Is this some new insight into the character? Is this a deliberate juxtaposition of a rational process in an irrational moment and how is that going to function? So I always have a lively dialogue going on between the critical and the creative sides of my mind.