Ten Writers Who Are Reinventing the Art of Storytelling

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Whitehead's city is a complex mix of contemporary issues and the urban imagery of 40 years ago. “I did that to suggest that things have changed but they haven't changed,” he says. The style he creates to portray this world is equally intricate and rich—a supple, jazzy instrument that can swing from deadpan satirical fantasy to a straight-ahead portrayal of the pain and stoicism of black people living in a ham-fisted white world, looking for the ultimate elevator that will take them up and out.

A. MANETTE ANSAY
A leap of faith with an eye on social change

When A. Manette Ansay was disabled by a rare muscle disorder at the age of 20, she began looking for a career she could pursue sitting down. “I picked writing out of the air,” she says. She made a New Year's resolution in early 1987 to write for two hours three times a week. The result of her leap of faith, followed by time at Cornell, has been a book of short stories and three novels, the most recent of which is River Angel (Morrow). The characters in the novel live in small-town Wisconsin, a setting Ansay knows well: A New Yorker now, she grew up in the little Wisconsin town of Port Washington, north of Milwaukee. Ansay also understands that in such a place faith can be very much a live issue. A lapsed Catholic, she can still write: “I understand the desire to believe. I live every day with the weight of that desire.”

What the denizens of the fictive Ambient, Wisconsin, most desire to believe, or debunk, according to their convictions, is that their town has been visited by an angel. An overweight, unattractive, and very devout little boy named Gabriel, tormented by his schoolmates, is either pushed or frightened into jumping off a bridge. Miraculously, his body reappears in a nearby barn—dead, but rosy-cheeked, warm, giving off a sweet scent. For believers, Gabriel has been lifted from the waters by the river angel, an apparition that has guarded the town for a century.

Around this tale—based on real events—Ansay spins a portrait of a small town undergoing gentrification, strip-malling, loss of farms, and loss of face-to-face trust. Ambient's citizens do their best to keep the faith—any faith, be it a rigid personal code, the land speculator's gospel of rampant “development,” or the kind of spirituality for which the town's angel is very real.

“I've visited lots of small towns recently,” says Ansay. “The more they are in transition from the old agrarian base to the new economy, the likelier there are to be supernatural events, like angel visitations.” Angels aren't just a tired marketing trend for such people, she adds; they're “a way we save ourselves. Angels are homemade; we tailor angels to our needs.” In a world of Wal-Marts, she seems to be suggesting, this is not the meanest of handicrafts.

JIM SHEPARD
Inside the skin of a vampire artist

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