Much of what happens to Meg and Rex aboard Chelone in Blue Water (William Morrow/Harper 2006) are derivatives of A. Manette Ansay’s open ocean experience aboard the real Chelone with her husband, Jake. The University of Miami associate professor of English and prolific author did endure batten-down-the-hatches squalls, days adrift in a windless stasis, and other salty-dog calamities during her three-month stay on the 38-foot sailboat. But the rest of the elaborate tale comes from a robust imagination that unfurls through a detailed regimen. After all, balancing a full teaching load, a 3-year-old daughter, and the occasional flare-up of a disease that formerly crippled her can inhibit the creative mind.

“In an ideal world, especially approaching the end of a novel, I write pretty much around the clock,” Ansay says. “I’ve got a book on tape going, I’ve got the computer on, I’ve got some meaningless project usually involving housework, and I just revolve around those things and sleep weirdly in between. I’ve often gone to colonies to finish books.”

It was in fact at The MacDowell Colony—the prestigious artist’s colony in New Hampshire that has hosted the likes of Aaron Copland and Alice Walker—that Ansay received a call from Oprah Winfrey about Vinegar Hill. The story of a woman’s struggle with overbearing in-laws and the harsh inflexibility of religion, Vinegar Hill is Ansay’s first novel and a 1999 Oprah Book Club Selection.

“The hardest thing was that Oprah said I couldn’t tell anyone,” Ansay recalls. “I had been living and working closely with 16 artists for a month, and when they asked who had called, I couldn’t tell them.”

After her chat with Oprah, Ansay retreated to her cabin and sat at the piano Leonard Bernstein used during his stay at MacDowell in the 1970s. It was an appropriate perch for her; she was once a piano performance major at the Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University. An illness with debilitating symptoms similar to multiple sclerosis struck in 1984, forcing her to leave Peabody in her second year. That’s when she took up writing.

Ansay, a native of Wisconsin, met husband Jake in 1987 as a student at the University of Maine. She was soft-spoken and studious, and he was outgoing and personable. She would spend time watching birds “on the rambling parts of campus,” and he would be watching her—not because she was in an electric wheelchair and had braces on her arms and legs, but because she was someone he wanted to meet. “It was a non-issue for him,” Ansay says, noting that she was very independent despite her disability. “We’re still on our first date.”

The couple married in 1990, a year before Ansay completed her Master of Fine Arts degree at Cornell and began teaching. For her 1999 appearance on Oprah, she insisted the producers film her both in her scooter and getting out of her scooter to show that people with disabilities “don’t have wheelchairs super-glued to their butts.” The publicity from the show drove Vinegar Hill past the million-copies-sold mark, allowing Ansay to stop working and investigate her illness full time. After completing Limbo, a memoir detailing her illness, she spent a year as an outpatient in an integrative medical center in New York City, where doctors determined she suffered from a deficiency in progesterone. Hormone therapy combined with immune-building treatments resolved the majority of her symptoms within six months.

“If Oprah hadn’t happened to pick up a book I’d written at the age of 25, I would not be walking today. I would not have a child. Sometimes, I wonder if I’d even be alive,” Ansay writes on her Web site, www.amanetteansay.com.

In 2001 a newly able-bodied Ansay set sail for three months with Jake aboard Chelone, the wellspring from which Blue Water began to flow. The book was originally a story about betrayal, infused with elements of airplanes and flying. But after living aboard Chelone and after daughter Genevieve was born, the story morphed into a sea-based tale of the relationship between a woman who lost her child and the woman whose actions took away the life of that child. The grieving mother, Meg, described the emptiness in the way friends tried to console her: “You grasp at such comforts the way a drowning person might reach for a piece of barbed wire. Because it is there. Because it is all you have.” The reference, it seems, also could describe the hope of a young woman who spent nearly 15 years in a wheelchair without explanation.

“I wrote most of the final version of Blue Water at the Holiday Inn Coral Gables during my second semester at the University of Miami,” says Ansay, who now lives with Jake and Genevieve in northern Palm Beach County, where her brother and parents live. She commutes to Miami via Tri-Rail.

Chronic eyestrain limits the amount of time Ansay can work consecutively, whether it’s on her five books presently under way or grading student work. Ansay loves how teaching gives her “a sense of contribution that’s very much cause and effect.” A pivotal teaching moment came early in her career, when she was an assistant professor of English at Vanderbilt University. She had overheard students talking about her in the library stacks.

“In a nutshell, they determined that if I was any good as a writer, I wouldn’t be teaching,” she recalls. “I thought for a long time about what my teachers have meant to me and what I want to mean to my students. I realized I didn’t have any illusions about teaching; I do it simply because I love it.”

Meredith Danton is editor of Miami magazine.