Bache, Ellyn 1942-

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BACHE, Ellyn 1942-

(E. M. J. Benjamin, Ellen Matthews)

PERSONAL: Surname rhymes with the letter "h"; born January 22, 1942, in Washington, DC; daughter of Herman (a musician) and Clara (Winik) Olefsky; married Terry Bache (a builder), 1969 (deceased); children: Beth, Matt, James, Ben. Education: University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill, B.A., 1964; University of Maryland—College Park, M.A., 1967. Religion: Jewish.

ADDRESSES: Agent—Jonathan Dolger, Jonathan Dolger Agency, 49 East 96th St., Suite 9B, New York, NY 10128.

CAREER: Freelance writer.

MEMBER: Authors Guild, Authors League of America, North Carolina Writers' Network.

AWARDS, HONORS: Willa Cather Fiction Prize, 1992, for The Value of Kindness.

WRITINGS:

(Under pseudonym Ellen Matthews) Culture Clash (nonfiction), Intercultural Press (Yarmouth, ME), 1982, revised edition, under name Ellyn Bache, 1989.

Safe Passage (novel), Crown (New York, NY), 1988.

Festival in Fire Season (novel), August House (Little Rock, AR), 1992.

The Value of Kindness (short stories), Helicon Nine (Kansas City, MO), 1993.

The Activist's Daughter (novel), Spinster's Ink (Denver, CO), 1997.

(Under pseudonym E. M. J. Benjamin; with husband, Terry Bache) Takedown (young adult novel), Banks Channel Books (Wilmington, NC), 1999.

Holiday Miracles: A Christmas/Hanukkah Story (novella), Banks Channel Books (Wilmington, NC), 2001.

Daddy and the Pink Flash (children's picture book), Banks Channel Books (Wilmington, NC), 2002.

(Author of book, with Joyce Cooper and Patricia Ruark) Writers Bloc (musical comedy for the stage), first produced in Wilmington, NC, by Thalian Association, 2003.

Contributor of short stories, articles, and reviews to magazines and newspapers, including McCall's, Seventeen, YM, Good Housekeeping, Shenandoah, New Letters, and Washington Post. Editor of Antietam Review, 1983-85; books editor of Encore, 1986-89.

ADAPTATIONS: The novel Safe Passage was adapted as a film, written by Deena Goldstone, directed by Robert Allan Ackerman, produced by Gale Anne Hurd, and starring Susan Sarandon and Sam Shepard, released by New Line Cinema in 1995.

WORK IN PROGRESS: A novel of women's friendships, set partly in North Carolina and partly in Washington, DC.

SIDELIGHTS: Ellyn Bache once told CA: "I started out as a freelance journalist for the Washington Post and Washington Star, working from home while our children were small. My first book was Culture Clash, a journal about sponsoring Vietnamese refugees, but after that I concentrated on fiction. It took six years before my first short story was published in McCall's—a great breakthrough for me.

"It's important to me that my novels be 'about' something. Festival in Fire Season is on the surface about a wildfire that threatens a southern coastal town during its azalea festival, but it also deals with race relations in the late 1980s. The Activist's Daughter, a coming-of-age story about a girl who comes south in 1963 to go to the University of North Carolina, is about the social conditions of that time, for minorities and women and the handicapped."

More recently Bache added: "I wrote my first novel, Safe Passage, after our youngest child was in school all day. It's about a family back home waiting to hear the fate of a son/brother who's a Marine in Beirut when the airport there is bombed by terrorists in 1983. It was published in 1988, but sadly became timely again after September 11, 2001. During the 2003 war in Iraq, the 1995 movie version, starring Susan Sarandon and Sam Shepard, was on television almost all night. Yet the book is really a domestic drama about maternal guilt. ('I'm doing something for myself; therefore, I must be neglecting my children, and I'm going to be punished by having something terrible happen to one of them.') I've always thought this accounted for the book being made into a film. The agent and screenwriter and producer were all mothers with busy careers, feeling neglectful of their children. Even Susan Sarandon had the babysitter bring her youngest to the set and insisted she be finished by Easter vacation, so she could take her children skiing.

"Takedown, which is one of my favorite books because I wrote it with my late husband, is about a high school wrestler with epilepsy who uses lessons learned from sports to get control of his life. Holiday Miracles tries to show the challenges interfaith families face every December. Even my one and only children's picture book, Daddy and the Pink Flash, is about how dads help their baby girls learn how brave and smart and capable they are.

"I always want the underlying themes to be serious, but it's important that the work itself be entertaining— funny or suspenseful or gripping in some other way— and not ponderous. When reviewers called The Activist's Daughter 'riveting' and Holiday Miracles 'deeply moving,' this was very reassuring to me, because it made me feel I was achieving what I was after."