Blue Water, Black Skies

Losing a child is a powerful subject for a novel. When it turns out that the loss was caused by your best friend, the plot thickens.

In November, when A. Manette Ansay presented her book, Blue Water, to the Indian River Literary Society she began by reading the opening paragraph as it is now, and as it was a few years ago. There was no similarity in the two pieces. She feels that, while it is being written, a book takes its own course, and quoted Grace Paley: “The shortest distance between two points is not a straight line, but an arch.”

Life for Ansay has not been a straight line either, but rather a series of extraordinary ups and downs. She was born and raised in a small Wisconsin town on Lake Michigan, the product of a Catholic home. “It was part of my Catholic upbringing that everything is meaningful and everything happens for a reason,” she said.

Read the entire article in the February 2008 issue